Again the day began with some coffee and food from the buffet in the hotel restaurant. We got up early(ish) to start the day’s journey. Today we wanted to go to Innsbruck in Austria, the Neushchwanstein castle and at the end of the day end up in the next hotel in the Black Forest. We all piled in the Benz and we were off.
My mom had a desire to go to the Swarovski crystal factory that is located in Austria just before Innsbruck. Like it or not this was the first stop on the day’s trip. We pulled up at the factory after a little miss-navigation caused by us thinking that we were smarter then the GPS unit (we are not apparently) we arrived.
It turns out that there is more to be done at the Swarovski factory then simply visit the store, there is a whole crystal theme park. We decided against the theme park because of the exorbitant price, plus it was just a bunch of crystals. So the shopping began. Mom shopped and shopped and shopped and shopped. While she was shopping I looked around the store at all the massive crystals. I also had some fun playing with the faucets in the bathroom that operate by touching a metal spot on the faucet prompting the water to flow out of the backlit stainless steel trough and into the sink. The more you pressed the button the more this bar of light changed colors. I fooled around with this for quite some time, both to kill time and because it fascinated me. Long story short I managed to get the entire thing to light up in red and stop working, I took my cue and left.
Soon the shopping was over and we were back in the car and on our way to Innsbruck. We parked the car upon arrival in a large underground parking lot and got out to explore the Altstat. We had some pizza from a street side Italian place, the weather was still unbelievable.
The next stop was the Neuschwanstein castle right across the German boarder. This is the castle that the Walt Disney Corporation logo is based off of. My mom stayed at “base camp” to shop and Stuart, Dad and I ventured up to check out the castle. It was HUGE. The place bled opulence, it was built by King Ludwig II as one of his many castles and is situated on a rocky outcrop that overlooks his mom’s castle. We managed to get up and down to/from the castle in 50min and soon were on the way to the Black Forest.
We rolled up at the hotel in Wolfach and piled all the bags into our rooms. This place was VERY nice, my mom just could not get enough of it and every second sentence was about how great it was. After putting our stuff away we went to the hotel restaurant for some eats. This was a contender for best meal of the trip. The owner of the place served/cooked the meal with help from her staff; the portions were huge and delectable.
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