Road Trip Day was something I was really really looking forward too ever since the idea got stuck inside my head a couple months earlier. I knew we wanted to go see Neuschwanstein Castle as it was the inspiration for the magic kingdom castle at Disney and is just really cool in general but while it is in Bavaria, it is not particularly close to Munich and there are no real public transportation ways to get there unless you want to go with an organized tour. We had limited time on the other side of the world so the thought of paying for a bus to take me an hour and a half one direction, make us stay all day in a limited area, and then take me an hour and a half back to the same place really didn’t appeal to me. So like any freedom loving American this lead me to the only logical conclusion… I needed to get a car. Once I decided on that I wanted to make sure we didn’t waste our day the same way the tour would so I made sure I would hit some speed limitless sections of the autobahn as well as doing a lot of research to find some awesome driving roads that would eventually put us in Zurich at the end of the night. What came out of that was one of the most complicated series of movements on our trip and we managed to pull them all off! The driving route is as follows:
After all of this driving the plan was to catch the train in Friedrichshafen and take it to Zurich. I needed to leave the car in Germany because dropping it off in another country made it much more expensive to rent. Anyway that’s enough background, onto the story 🙂
After getting the car, an Audi A5 convertible, from the hotel we took off headed toward the castle. Fortunately for me this was on the autobahn and I was able to go 212 kph which was pretty fun and I knocked about 30 minutes off of Google’s expected ETA for our trip. We made it to the base village at around 7:45 and were able to park around 8 AM. We had the castle all to ourselves because the tours of the rooms didn’t start until 9 AM which meant we could go in the courtyard and see the scenery without waiting. It was a lot of fun and I wish we would have had enough time to wait for the castle to open but we had to get food and get on our way.
Shortly after leaving the castle we crossed the border into Austria! Another perk of our route that I hadn’t talked much about because I didn’t want to set you up to be disappointed was that we were going to be going up into the Alps where there is snow year round. Luckily we were able to find some snow where we could pull over and you got to see and touch snow for the first time! After some arguing and motion sickness we were finally out of the mountains and we got you some food in Imst. From there it was a fairly boring drive to the train station.
Once we got to the town we were leaving from I realized the distance from the drop off point to the train station was not insignificant especially with all the stuff we were carrying at that point and in a town this sparse there were not a lot of options for public transportation to bridge that gap. So I dropped you and Andrew off at the train station with all the stuff while I drove the car back to the drop off point. After I dropped off the keys I ran 2.6 kilometers in under 20 minutes wearing jeans to make sure I made the train on time. I did but was really exhausted after everything we had done that day.
The train ride to Switzerland was gorgeous and we same some amazing scenery and houses around the lake we circled.
Transportation Stats:
| Day | Date | Walking Distance | Walking Time | Steps | Calories | Flying Distance | Flying Time | Public Trans Distance | Public Trans Time | Driving Distance | Driving Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 | 26-May | 5.6 | 2:54 | 16,097 | 728 | 0 | 0:00 | 77 | 2:52 | 204 | 6:22 |