Scenic Bavaria
Another Hansel and Gretel town..Oberammergau
Story of the Passion Play
From Salzburg we headed straight into the heart of Bavaria. We took the safe route from the northern freeway into a small town called Oberammergau. It looks like Hansel and Gretel lived in every house. The attraction here was the Passion Play the town performs every 10 years since the 1600's. It's one of those things you wouldn't know about unless you watch too much Rick Steves or Samantha Brown on the travel channel. Hundreds of years ago the town swore it would do a Passion Play every 10 years if the town was spared further deaths from the Plague. The story says that happened, so the play is on. 2010 is a play year. Our intention was to attend the play, until we learned it's 8 hours long and in German. So we visited the town, toured the theater and had some lunch. Luckily we found the bus parking. After taking the "big" roads up here in the Alps, we were pleased with our decision not to come up the southern mountain route from Innsbruck. The 2nd stop of the day is Nieuwenstein Castle. This is a story book castle from every one's child hood. It was build in the 1800's by the Bavarian King Ludwig. He basically drained the national treasury building castles all around. This one was never completed. He was removed from power and mysteriously was found dead in a local lake. Getting to the castle once you park your camper is a royal pain. It's nice mile walk uphill to the ticket center. From there you can take a smelly horse cart to the castle or take a bus about half way up the hill. We waited about 20 minutes in the heat for a bus and decided the hike to the castle wasn't worth it. We admired the castle from the stop and at scenic bridges a few hundred feet away. Cinderella would be happy here. From here we drove a decent distance to Munich. We made a stop at the local "Frys Electronics" to consider buying charger for Frederick's Dad's camera, since he forgot the charger, and a new camera for us. Yes, I killed 2 cameras on this trip. The first was from a spill on the Segway. The camera took pictures, but we couldn't get the view finder to work. The second was in Mauthausen. I fell in a hole with our other camera in hand. It was a grand spill. This time, this camera won't even turn on. I found a great camera, at a great price, but again they didn't take credit cards, so we decided to conserve our cash on hand. No sale for you Germany!
Eventually we were able to rig up a way to charge Frederick's Dad's 2nd camera with a universal battery charger I had brought with me. They let us use that one for the rest of the trip.
We arrived at the Munich campsite at 8PM. We intended to hit the local, famous main Biergarten, but the last bus returned at 9PM. No way we'd make it. We stayed at the campground and ate in their take away restaurant. I had a surprisingly yummy cheeseburger! One shower token here gave you a ton of hot water with great water pressure (hey, I've come to appreciate these things), however the campground required you bring our own toilet paper.
Germans seem to have an obsession with recycling and green. The only toilet paper we could find was very spartan, single ply brown paper towel material. Each German campsite had an elaborate system for recycling each color of glass, plastic, paper products, food waste and then everything else. We would learn just how far this obsession went on our next stop.
We spent the night and headed for Stuttgart the next morning, with our ultimate destination Diekirch, Luxembourg.
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