May

She who is delinquent with her blogging is here to catch up.

Mom and Tracy bravely spent two weeks with their youngest grandchildren and did not once try to skive out of the visit by saying that they forgot to turn the coffee pot off and needed to fly home immediately. We had a wonderful weekend in Munich and got to see what German's call the fairy-tale castle, Neuschwanstein. It is indeed something to revel to see. We did the full bit: carriage ride up the mountain to the ridge and a short walk to the castle. We were there on May Day weekend (FYI: May Day is a national holiday in Germany but I think the reason is that they hadn't had a national holiday since the previous weekend and they go a bit off if they have to work 20 full days in a month.)

The castle has an efficient system for moving the 1.3 million annual visitors a year through the relatively few furnished rooms. I have greater empathy with a beer going through a bottling factory. It would have been a little easier if they had dropped us into six-packs and zoomed us through on rails, but that would have damaged the authenticity of the building. So this was the next best thing. 

We bought our tickets in advance, got our number, passed through two turnstiles which divided us into groups and then were lined up in shoots, about 40 at a time, that were sorted by tour language and off we went. Worth it. The place is amazing.

It took years just to do the wood carving on the inside of Ludwig's bedroom. The top of his bed is covered with small carved models of gothic church spires of Europe.

On the way back to Munich we stopped at Tegelburg. It has a gondola that takes you about 5,000 feet up the Alps. On beautiful days, which this was, hang gliders and para sailers take off every few minutes and land at the bottom of the park. For us, there was a luge on a track that we went down. Micah took a pass, but the rest of us,  Matcy and Granddad included, took a ride. MM begged for more speed.

Sunday was downtown Munich, a stunning city with parks and ancient buildings. Lunch at the Hofbrauhaus. It was the first time the kids had seen a German oompa band. Most of the people were tourists like us. But it was fun to see Real Germans there. Older people still put on traditional German dress and stroll the Platz on Sundays. At the Hofbrauhaus there are a few walls of stein holders for the personal beer glasses of the regulars. Special to see a man in a Bavarian suit and hat take his stein to the massive copper sink, wash his glass and lock it back in the massive metal rack.