A Comedy of Errors

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"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." -Morrow
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"Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile." -F.P. Jones

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2004-06-16
and now, for the rest of the story...

07:29

Monday - drove to Brugges, Belgium. Lots of WWI sites around, including the famous poppy fields (immortalized in the poem, "In Flanders Fields"), but never did see any, although I wanted to. We stayed there for two nights, visiting the town, doing touristy stuff like take a canal and horse carraige tour of the town. It's really a beautiful town, with a bridge from the 14th century that is still in use and has never needed renovation. Also, in my continued quest to climb the tallest thing in sight, I went to the top of the belfry and had a nice view, even barely making out the North Sea.

Wednesday - down the Romantic road to Rudesheim, Germany on the Rheine. Stayed in a lovely inn that had wonderful live music playing well into the night. I was the youngest there by about thirty years. Next morning, we took a boat ride on the Rheine.

Thursday - next stop: the well-preserved Medieval city of Rothenburg, Germany. There for two nights. We took a tour with the Night Watchman, which was probably one of the best and most interesting tours I've ever done. He had such fun stories! And told them so well. He said that Rothenburg was preserved by poverty because it was too poor to modernize. It used to be a rich city, the crossroads of two major trading routes. After the 30-years-war, they were so decimated that they were in poverty for 250 years until tourism started up, and now that's how they make their money. Let's just say that my stepmom and I certainly helped them out there! ;)

Saturday - F�ssen in Bavaria, on the border of Austria, was our final stop. We visited two castles of King Ludwig II - one he grew up in, one he built. The latter is supposedly the basis for the Cinderella castles at the Disney themeparks. It's certainly beautiful, but the man was obsessed with building castles - he built three, and had a fourth planned. He was good friends with Wagner and loved his operas, so all of the scenes inside the Cinderella castle were from one opera or another. He only lived in it for about six months, though. He was declared insane at that point, and was discovered dead - along with his doctor - in three feet of water the day after he received that information. (Personally, I think that they declared him insane so that he would stop spending all of Bavaria's money on castles.) He had no heir so it passed to his brother, Otto, who was also declared unfit to rule (maybe they were afraid that he would build castles, too), so then it was their uncle who took the throne, who died without an heir, as well, in 1912. Germany was turned over to the Kaiser and the rest, as they say, is history.

Sunday - a short visit over the border into Reutte, Austria and then back up to Frankfurt where I caught a (very expensive) train back to Bremen, arriving about midnight.

Thus, there doth endeth my story.

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