After having our photos taken for the Hotel Rossli family album, we left our jovial host in Interlaken to head back to Germany today and our stop for tonight. Little did we expect that we would be crossing 6 borders during the day – though we may have lost count !
Today was a big driving day and toward the end of the day we clocked up 2,000km in Europe so far. The Swiss part of the drive was nearly tunnel after tunnel – I think the longest we went through was 5.8km long. We went past others being built and at this rate you will be able to visit Switzerland entirely by tunnel soon – would seem to defeat the purpose !
The Lion Monument
Our first stop was Lucerne which was fairly quiet generally as it was Sunday. We found the Lion Monument which commemorates the Swiss Guards who were killed defending Marie Antoinette in the French Revolution. Then we walked across a couple of the old wooden bridges over the river which have sections in the roof containing paintings going back centuries.
One of the old bridges across the river in Lucerne
There was a fire on one of the bridges about 15 or so years ago that destroyed some of these paintings and the new sections of the bridge needed to repair the damage are now blank. There are “no smoking” signs all over the place to try and avoid it happening again.
We then headed into “Heidi Country” as the book was Adrienne’s favourite when she was a little girl. We nearly ended up having to rent a room from Heidi as a combination of roadworks and the GPS not knowing where we were going had us almost driving through the vineyards on the mountain !
We managed to get back to the autobahn and headed for Liechtenstein. Again, as it was Sunday there was not a lot going on ( “we went to Liechtenstein but it was closed” ) . We walked along a plaza which had a couple of cafes and souvenir stores open but nothing much else seemed to be happening.
The Prince’s castle
The “royal” family still live in the castle above the city so you can’t visit – obviously don’t need the money yet – and as the country is a tax haven probably won’t ever need it. So having spent less time in this country than we did on our stopover in Singapore, we headed off back across the river to Switzerland and were on our way again.
Following the GPS we suddenly found ourselves heading toward another autobahn when we came across the Austrian border. We approached the border guards and stop sign scrabbling for our passports and the car had hardly stopped and the guard was waving us on again – so much for passports in Europe – they let me into Germany in the wrong queue and since then no one could care less !
The next problem was we needed another “vingette” toll tag for Austria so we had to find somewhere to get one before we got to the autobahn. Luckily we found a petrol station selling them – 7.90 Euro compared to the 40 francs we had to pay for the Swiss one !
Along the autobahn a bit and then we hit Germany (or was it Switzerland again?). We took a wrong turn when the GPS lost its signal and when we got the signal back it took us on an alternative route which turned out to be quite pretty through the hills and valleys and little towns and villages. We then headed along a section of the German Alpine Way and stopped at a point to take a photo which was on our calendar at home before we left.
View from the Oberjoch from the Allgau Alps
The road was very winding up into the Allgau Alps but the view was great – a little into the sun for the photo though.
This road eventually took us back into Austria briefly and then we were finally back in Germany for the last time today – the border crossing half way through a tunnel.
We reached our destination late in the afternoon and Adrienne and I walked around the village a little before dinner whilst Liam recovered from his hectic day watching videos in the car by sitting in the room watching videos.
Neuschwanstein Castle
We have a perfect view of Neuschwanstein castle from the balcony
of our room as you can see from the photo. We walked along the road a little and also had a good view of Hohenschwangau as well.
It is very quiet now in the village as all the buses that were here left around 19:00. We will have a closer look at the castles tomorrow before we head off again.