What kind of vacation story series would this be if it did not include something going wrong—and an unexpected detour? Based on the title of this post, you are probably expecting to see some dramatic photos of Schloss Neuschwanstein, which inspired the castles at Disneyland and Disney World. I would love to show them to you, but that would mean we actually made it to the castle with without incident. Unfortunately, things did not quite work out the way we had planned. Our plan was a drive from Salzburg to Schloss Neuschwanstein, and then on to Rothenburg ob der tauber, our destination for the evening.
We were about an hour outside of Fussen, where Schloss Neuschwanstein is located, cruising through Murnau am Staffelsee. It was a gorgeous day in the Alps. Then, BANG—the front right tire of our car blew out on a very narrow road, in a country where I can barely speak the language, with a 16-year-old who can’t speak it at all. I also had no idea where we were, as I had been following a line on GPS. Due to the narrowness of the roads, I had to keep going until I found a place I could pull over. I finally found a bus stop and pulled in. I went around the back of the car to get the spare, and instead what I found in the spare tire’s space was this high tech fix-a-flat thing. I thought I would give it a try. As I was putting it together the canister of sticky stuff that was supposed to go inside the tire blew up in the front passenger compartment. Crap!
At this point all I could do was hope that the International cell phone plan I purchased from AT&T worked. I dug through the rental car paperwork and found the emergency number. The menu was in German. I was able to fumble through the automated menu with the elementary German I learned while I was stationed there 30 years before. Then a live person answered the phone, in German. I knew my German was not good enough to hold a conversation, so I did all I could do, and asked, “Sprechen sie Englisch?” The voice on the other end immediately changed to English. Then she asked where we were so she could send a tow truck. I tried to give her the GPS coordinates, and she said those would not work. So I did my best giving her a description of the cross road, bus stop, and rail line we were near.
An hour later a tow truck arrived. He took one look at our tire and said, “Shit.” My son and I took that as a sign he could not fix the tire. I asked him if he had any trouble finding us, he said a little, and wondered why we did not give our GPS coordinates. Turns out he had the same GPS in his truck as I had in the car.
An hour-long drive later, we were at the tire place in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. While it’s a place that wasn’t on our itinerary, it turns out I had visited 30 years before. The U.S. Army had a rec center there, and I had been skiing at that center in my youth. While waiting for our tire to be replaced, we went to a Gasthaus next door to the tire place.
A couple hours later, we were on our way to Rothenburg ob der tauber. We missed Schloss Neuschwanstein, we missed our tour time, but because we were in Garmisch, our route changed—we had to drive through the Austrian Alps to get back to the Autobahn to Germany. Sorry, I have no photos of this part of the journey we were both too busy gawking at the mountains and forgot to take pictures of them.
We finally arrived in Rothenburg ob der tauber at 7 PM that night, both of us wiped from a long day of driving. We checked into our 800-year-old hotel, ate dinner and explored Rothenburg, which appeared to be a quiet sleepy walled town.
The next day we had our European breakfast, and went out to explore Rothenburg—which turned out to not be the sleepy little town we thought it was the night before. This was tourist central. It was the Wisconsin Dells without the water slides. Every single shop catered to tourists. I lost count of the number of languages I heard just walking down the street.
It was not all about shopping, as we did visit the medieval crime museum. It was a pretty impressive collection of man’s inhumanity to man through the middle ages, and in some cases up to the 20th century. Judging from the collection and the rules that governed daily life in medieval times, I likely would have been accused of witchcraft in my teens and burned at the stake.
One thing that kept crossing my mind as we were in Rothenburg was that this had been a tourist attraction in the ‘80s when I was stationed in Germany. Just 90 minutes north was the Fulda Gap. It’s a place where I expected to go war while I was there. I wonder if the tourists had any idea of how close we were to going to war, or just how close they were to a potential battlefield? While they were shopping for beer steins and cuckoo clocks, I was preparing for war just down the road from them. I am going to guess that those 1980s tourists had no idea.