Adventures of Clay and Pam

Clay and I flew to Munich, Germany, in September. Shelley rented a gorgeous BMW in Vilseck and traveled to Munich to meet us. From Munich we went to Garmisch in the German Alps. Garmisch is a market town that is 1100 years old. It was home to the 1936 Olympics.

We stayed at a perfect 2 bedroom apartment that was nestled in a quiet neighborhood along side a babbling brook with perfect views of the Alps from our balcony. In the photos you can see Shelley on the phone to Beaux in Iraq. She really lights up when she is talking to him. You also see Clay and I with our "telescopes" out. Actually, there was no telescope, but it did seem to help. The pictures of Shelley and I looking goofy was when we were trying to get our perfect pose for all the vacation pictures. I am pretty sure we never found the best pose. At least I didn't. The three of us really enjoyed our time at the apartment in the evenings at one point discovering that Shelley was of Latvian descent (inside joke), but during the day it was go, go, go.
We took a cogwheel train to the top of the Zugspitz, the highest point in the German Alps. The view was breathtaking. We stood on a glacier and enjoyed a perfect sunny day at the top of the world. Clay needs to tell more about this....

Another day we went through the Partnach Gorge. The gorge is 800 meter stretch of mountain side cut by a stream. The cravasse cuts 80 meters deep. The swift moving glacial waters rush by at a violent speed. Instead of backtracking through the gorge back to our car, we decided to go up and over. Well that 800 meters of flat path was 5 miles of up and down, up and down and up, up, up and down doing the up and over. We did get to view beautiful meadows, Heidi's goats, outstanding vistas, and views of the gorge way down below us. An interesting note to add is that with Shelley driving but Clay navigating, we drove up toward the gorge, right past the parking lots, way past the parking lots, up to the point where some weird local started yelling at us about NO CARS! We did wonder why we were the only ones not walking.

For lunch that day we drove to Lake Eibsee which we had seen from the Zugspitz. We had a wonderful lunch lakeside, rented a paddleboat, then hiked another bazillion miles by the lake. Yes, it was as beautiful as the pictures show. It was a picture perfect day.

One of the only two rainy days we experienced was perfect to visit Schloss Linderhof, a palace of King Ludwig's, and the only palace of his to see completion. The gardens were splendid, I think enhanced by the gently falling rain. On the grounds was a grotto. The grotto is wholly artificial and was built for the king as an illustration of the First Act of Wagner's "Tannhäuser". Ludwig liked to be rowed over the lake that was constructed inside the grotto in his golden swan-boat. Wagner was a frequent visitor to the palace.

Near the Schloss Linderhoff was Oberammergau where the famous Passion Play has been performed since 1634. We ate lunch at a small cafe, the highlight of which were the delicious desserts. Down the road was the town of Ettal, famous for the Ettal monestary. The benedictine monestary was founded in 1330. One of the features of the abbey, besides the beautiful building itself, is the brewery. We bought some locally brewed beer of course. In fact we sampled pretty much every beer in Germany and Austria during our trip.

A note here about the cathedral pictures. I am all mixed up about which are the Monastery in Ettal, which are from Salzburg and which are from Passau. They were all quite beautiful. If you would like to investigate further, well, you are on your own. I know there are mistakes.

In the evenings we ate scrumptous dinners, drank beer at various beer gardens and soaked in the atmosphere. The highlight of my dining experience was at a beer garden there in Garmisch where I ordered a deep fried hog something or other. It was a pig's leg. Complete with skin, fat and some hair, not all that much hair, but how much is too much? It was delicious (deep down inside). We saw many people ordering the leg and to our astonishment we saw them finish the thing off down to a clean bone. They ate the skin and the fat, hair and all.

Then we went on to Innsbruck for a few hours in the old town. The architecture was splendid, the crowds very international. According to Wikipedia, earliest traces suggest Innsbruck's initial inhabitation was in the early Stone Age! The river through Innsbruck is the Inn, which we saw again in Passau. The day was sunny and perfectly beautiful. We walked throughout the old town past cafes of all different foods and settled on a sidewalk cafe of pizza (we were minutes away from Northern Italy after all) and then we were off to Salzburg.

I must say, Salzburg didn't start off that great. We had to park outside the old town and haul our suitcases into the town through cobblestone streets, up four flights of stairs to an unairconditioned apartment in a building that was build in the 1300's. The apartment itself was beautiful. The pictures I have included don't do it justice. We noted the first night that living above a city on narrow cobblestone streets four stories up has a unique sound at night. Well, lots of sounds. Every sound that was even whispered in the streets below came right through our window. And early in the morning, around the crack of dawn right after all the bars closed the trash was collected. Loudly. It was definitely an experience. The beams in our apartment were over 700 years old and original. We figured the whole place was haunted. In the pictures below, the pink building with the bookstore was our building. The narrow streets were right there by us. The bakery, the restaurants, the square, everything was right at our doorstep.

In Salzburg we investigated the Fortress at the end of the day, the catacombs another day, the Mirabel gardens, and the Augustiner beer garden. Clay was very happy to be in a beer garden with such great history. It was just enchanting. Oh, notice the fish on a stick. Their version of fish sticks. We passed on the fish sticks. Instead, we had great bratwurst and mouthwatering ribs with our beer. One day in Salzburg Shelley and I did a long afternoon of shopping together without Clay. Clay is really just not a shopper, and we weren't going to buy, but we were definitely going to look and look and look so he stayed behind and napped. Shelley and I looked at everything! We found a wonderful Hummel music box that will always remind Shelley of our trip. We looked, we wandered, we went round in circles throughout the town. It was so fun for me to be with my beautiful daughter! Eventually we hauled our suitcases through the cobblestone streets back to the car and left Salzburg behind.

On to Passau! Passau is in Germany. Passau is old -from the 5th century. It is full of history; Hitler lived there, blah, blah, blah. But we went to see the largest pipe organ in the world and to attend the concert held every day at noon. The road from Salzburg to Passau was not the autobahn. It was a beautiful drive through the countryside behind tractor after tractor. We arrived in Passau just before noon. And surprisingly, we were not the only tourists on the planet to know about the organ recital. Duh. It took us forever to find a parking space, then we had to walk through the streets only following what we were assuming to be the right cathedral sticking up. We were about 20 minutes late to the cathedral and there was no more room inside - the doors were closed and locked from the outside. So much for hearing the largest organ in the world. But after a nice lunch we visited, took lots of pictures, and put the organ recital on hold for another trip. Maybe Shelley and Beaux can go sometime and tell us all about it. We missed a Mozart recital in Salzburg, now we have missed a recital of the world's largest organ. Oh well.

We then took the autobahn back to Vilseck. Shelley has definitely become familiar with driving the autobahn. And with the great BMW she rented, we zooooooommmmed. Once back in Vilseck, Shelley's condo was spotlessly clean and so inviting. Conan and Lucy were glad Shelley was home. From the condo (we wished Beaux was there, too) we did day trips to Rothenburg, Amberg, Pottenstein, and Grafenwofr. I wonder how that is really spelled? Frequently we encounted roadside Blumen's. They were little patches of gardens that Shelley described as self serve. We stopped at on and there hung a knife to cut your flowers and a lock box to insert the fee per flower. It was a very cold, windy day that day, but Shelley and I had a great time. We were on our way to a corn field labryinth in Amberg, but ended up not going to it. We arrived an hour or so too early and felt like the corn was way too short to be a good labryinth. We could have been wrong, but it was awfully cold to return.

Vilseck, Amberg, Rothenburg, and Pottenstein to come....