LittleFireDragon

I'm sorry to say I won't be posting any more chapters for my undertale fanfic. Life has changed and I just don't have the time, energy, or motivation for writing long, ongoing stories anymore. Since the story only just got started, I'll be removing the existing chapters as I won't be finishing the story.

Nothing worth reporting, just replacing a previous journal that is now outdated and should not be plastered on my front page.

Hey everyone.
An internet friend I've mentored in the art of drawing dragons, SpiritDragonTano, needs some help with a real-life money crisis.

Here's his journal: Need some help with something right now, urgent https://gofund.me/transitioning-jobs-and-need-help?pc=tw_cr_nPretty self explanitory explanation of my situation on this page.

I've interacted with him quite a bit over the last... how long has it been? Over a year at least.

Normally I wouldn't trust this sort of thing on the internet (lazy scammers will make just about anything up to get money), but having followed his personal story via journal updates, and knowing what he's like as a person, I believe his story and I vouch for his character. If you've got some spare cash, send some his way.

So I'm attempting to draw my Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir characters. I'm starting with the male swashbuckler, because he seems like he'd be the most interesting one to draw.
Only to get to his interesting design, I have to first get a pose and proportions down on the page. And it occurs to me that I have no idea what I'm doing.
Apparently I only know how to draw women and dragons. XD

It's frustrating, really, and part of me wants to say "Screw it" but the thing is, I'll never get any better if I don't draw the challenging stuff.

So I guess what I'm saying is, if you feel like you're not good enough, or don't know what you're doing... you're not alone. All artists go through that, especially when drawing something that isn't their normal subject matter. And the only way to get better is to push the boundaries and tackle the challenging stuff.

Alright, so, I apologize for the delay in getting this story up. I had a lot of pictures to go through and touch up, and, as you’ll see, quite a bit of writing to do. But here it is. Some of the pictures will have extra details and commentary in the artist notes, but this post tells the overall story. This post will also be full of links. Some of them are just wikipedia links for those who want more info on something or don't know what it is, but some are links to google image searches, the web pages of the particular hotel or apartment we stayed in, etc. So let’s get started!

The journey began with a more-or-less uneventful flight to Seattle, Washington, where we stayed the night before flying off to Europe. My Nintendo 2DS broke before we ever got off the ground (suitcase it was in fell over and the screen cracked), so I bought a new one in Seattle. My dad’s currently trying to fix my old one because I had some software installed on the device which could not be transferred over (but my important games are all on cartridge, so that’s good).

We had intended to take a shuttle from the airport to the hotel. We waited and waited but didn’t see our hotel’s shuttle. We tried calling the hotel from the phones intended specifically for that, but just got hung up on, which was a little jarring. Eventually we got fed up and (having called and been hung up on a second time) called a taxi. It turned out that the hotel used shuttles where the hotel logo was displayed very small on the side of the shuttle, where very few people notice it, and the hotel was used to people calling to ask where the shuttle was, and having to explain what the shuttle looked like. Unfortunately what had happened was that evidently when we called the hotel, they couldn’t hear anything. So they hung up.

Once we got there, since we had been expecting a four-star hotel and my mother had somehow mistakenly booked a two-and-a-half-star hotel, we were a little disappointed. It wasn’t that bad, though. In fact it was pretty good for a hotel of that ranking. We had an awesome breakfast at an IHOP nearby, and then we were off to the airport.

Good lord, I’ve written rather a lot, haven’t I? And we haven’t even gotten to Europe yet. Anyway, we flew business-class, which was nice, with seats that folded out so we could lay down. I didn’t get any sleep anyway. Watched some Miraculous Ladybug we’d downloaded beforehand on my dad’s laptop, appropriately enough, since we were on our way to Paris.

When we arrived, we were introduced to the apartment we’d be staying in. It was in a building constructed in the 17th century, and our apartment had exposed timber beams on the ceiling. It was really quite lovely, and it looked right out over the Seine, directly across from the Palais de Justice (Palace of Justice). If you leaned slightly out the window and looked to the right, you could also see Notre Dame.

   

Now, we happened to arrive just in time for the heavy rains that would cause the Seine to flood to its highest point since 1910. And we were there for nearly the whole thing. I happened to snap a picture of the Palace of Justice on our first night, before the flooding started, and I got another just before we left, and boy can you see the difference.

   

The Palace of Justice is part of the Palais de la Cité, along with the Conciergerie and Sainte-Chapelle. Also, evidently, a police station. We got used to hearing French sirens, day in, day out, as part of the sounds of Paris, but I digress. Our first day in Paris, having rested well in actual beds, we were full of energy and enthusiasm, despite the relentless rain, and went to the Conciergerie first. Parts of it survive from a medieval fortress, but its main claim to fame is being the prison building where people sentenced to be executed by guillotine were kept during the French Revolution, including Marie Antoinette.

   

At the gift shop, I bought a couple little decorative pillowcases (one with the unicorn from the Lady and Unicorn Tapestries, one red with gold fleur-de-lis on it), and then we moved on to Sainte-Chapelle. I’ll be honest, I think Sainte-Chapelle is much prettier than Notre Dame.

   

In fact, I only got one picture I liked well enough to upload inside Notre Dame. That being said, on our second day in Paris, I did get a couple nice photos of the outside! From the back, no less; the front is overrated and overcrowded.

     

Day two also saw us visiting the Carnavalet Museum, which has nothing to do with carnivals, by the way. Part of the museum is as you’d expect – artifacts and paintings on display. But part of it is old rooms with period furniture, which made for some great photos.

       

That night we had expected to go on a Paris Authentic tour of the city, but somehow, and I don’t know nor venture to guess who was to blame, they had us marked as being reserved for a tour on a date we weren’t even supposed to be in Europe. Finding this out was a real pain, because long story short, our phones didn’t really work right. Yes, we did make the necessary preparations. We did eventually (meaning later in the trip) figure out how to get the phone to work, but that took a lot of time and fiddling around with the thing. For that night, we simply ended up borrowing the phone of a local in a bar. Eventually, we got the issue figured out and rescheduled the tour for the next night, and bought the guy and his friends a drink in thanks for letting us use his phone for so long.

Our last day in Paris was pretty eventful. We went to the Medieval Museum, which also includes the ruins of a Roman bathhouse. Most famously, the museum is home to the Lady and Unicorn tapestries, which I should note are freaking huge. You expect them to be around five feet wide, but it turns out they’re more like ten. Needless to say, the museum was pretty cool. It was not, however, particularly photogenic in most places, and as I intend to stick to the idea that deviantart is for art and not just random snapshots of your vacation, I don’t have many pictures of it to share with you.

   

I also added to my pillowcases with a table runner with unicorns on it at the gift shop here. Afterwards, we went to the Panthéon, and saw the burial places of Voltaire, Rousseau, Louis Braille, Alexandre Dumas, and Marie Curie, as well as a whole lot of important people I didn’t know, were buried.

   

From there, we took a taxi partway to the Eiffel Tower, and walked the rest of the way. Much of the park and some of the paths were closed off because they were prepared for a concert or something, so we ended up taking a rather roundabout path, but we got there eventually.

 

And of course, that night we took the Paris Authentic tour. I sat in the front of the little car, so I could have the best views, since my parents had been to Paris before. Of course, it was raining, so “best” is definitely relative. Being an old Citroën 2CV, the car had no window defoggers, so I kept having to wipe the windows with my hands. Similarly, we all got very worked up whenever there was a possibility we might have to stop the car on a hill, because that little car didn’t have much power.

It did stop raining briefly when we stopped to get out of the car at one point, and while the panoramic view of Paris at night was beautiful, it didn’t photograph very well. The nearby church, however, did.

 

That exciting trip marked the end of our stay in Paris, but I have a few more photos, taken at random locations while wandering around the city.

     

We left Paris by RER – through a station that was closed off due to the flooding of the Seine the day after! In a side note, they also closed the Louvre down due to flooding not long after we left. Once off the train, we picked up our French rental car, a gray Mini Cooper. I proved invaluable in figuring out how to control the electronics and set the language to English. Despite not speaking any French, I was able to make some sense of the instruction manual and the car’s electronics system interface. We then set our GPS and set off for Fontainebleau.

We soon named her GLaDOS, because it rapidly became apparent that she was trying to kill us. Her instructions were worded awkwardly at times, leading to such incidents as apparently being told to stay in the right lane, then told to turn left (that was a matter of learning to understand her intentions, which we eventually managed). She also had a tendency to direct us onto one way streets in the wrong direction or into restricted access zones – i.e. places where cars are not supposed to go.

We did eventually make it to Fontainebleau Palace, though. It turned out that was the day when entrance was free, and accordingly it seemed like every school in France had the class there on a field trip. If you managed to position yourself between two classes, though, you could have a given room pretty much to yourself though. I got several photos here, although we didn’t see as much of the gardens as we could have, because the horse carriages that we planned to take around the grounds were not running due to, surprise, surprise, the rain.

       

     

Having seen what there was to see at Fontainebleau, we moved on, and drove to Rouen. That was a mistake. Take it from me: never, ever drive into Rouen. Go to Rouen, but not by car. It was the most awful, confusing system of roads any of us had ever seen. Apparently it’s because, aside from a rat’s nest of one way streets (that GLaDOS gleefully tried to send us down the wrong way), a huge portion of the streets have been closed off and made pedestrian-only. We had to park near the cathedral and my parents walked to the hotel to get directions to the parking garage. Eventually we managed to get there, and it had the narrowest corridors and parking spaces – which is why we had a Mini Cooper.

But we made it. And our room was lovely. It had windows all along the walls, end to end, looking out onto the cathedral right next door and down the beautiful cobblestone streets with the half-timbered buildings.

     

It really is a beautiful place. We spent most of our visit just wandering around, although I did get a European power cord for my 2DS while we were here (even with a plug adapter, the voltages in European sockets didn’t agree with the American power cord), and bought a pack of French Pokémon cards while I was at it.

       

Rouen, if you’re wondering, is famous for being the place where Joan of Arc was burned. In fact, there’s a plaque designating the exact spot.

 

And naturally, there’s a museum dedicated to her. This is no ordinary museum, either. It involves an immersive, pseudo-VR experience where you observe the trial in which they decided whether to throw out the results of the original trial responsible for Joan’s execution. No pictures, because deviantart is for art, but here’s a youtube video that gives you some idea what it’s like.

Next stop was Mont Saint-Michel, where we stayed for a night. No photos of the view from the room, because it was just water at high tide and mud at low tide – Mont Saint-Michel is a tidal island! Despite the appearance, it’s not a castle but a monastery.

 

During the day, it’s packed to bursting with tourists, but at night the whole place empties out. According to Wikipedia, about 25 people actually sleep on the island every night, not counting tourists staying in hotels – like my family!

The monastery is up at the very top of the island, so we had to hike up the long and winding path with its many, many stairs. But it was a beautiful walk, indeed, and there was a small chapel not too far up. There were also tons of seagulls nesting on the island, and we even saw some fluffy babies, and one seagull that let me walk right up to it.

         

Once we reached the top, we could explore the monastery and its beautiful cloister. One side of the cloister was originally just completely open, save for the arches that opened up onto empty space. Of course, now they’ve put up Plexiglas for safety reasons. Which is all scuffed up and not very photogenic. But at least the rest of the cloister was pretty!

   

Apparently some of the people who live here are monks and nuns – such as the one sitting in silent prayer in the corner of this picture.

 

After we had dinner that night, my dad wasn’t feeling too good. We suspect it was a delayed reaction to going from the constant stress of work to vacation, or possibly a reaction to driving around on strange French roads with crazy French traffic and unfamiliar French road signs. It may or may not have been set off initially by bad fish. Whatever the cause, he wasn’t feeling up to going out and exploring more that night, so my mom and I went by ourselves to see the monastery all lit up in the evening.

   

The next morning we departed for Amboise. Poor Dad, having to drive in that condition – but there was no other way for us to get around. I can’t drive stick, and even if I could, neither my mom or I were willing to risk trying to drive in France, unlike my dad, who is a Really Good Driver. At any rate, he got us there, but the lady who owned the cottage we were staying in wasn’t there to let us in (although there was a stray cat and its adorable little kitten).

 

While we had gotten our phones to work by now, when we called her, we only got her answering machine. Which of course was in French. My mom speaks some French, and was able to tell that it was giving us her cell phone number, but she couldn’t make out all of the numbers. It was then that I came up with the idea of using my dad’s phone to make an audio recording of the answering machine as played from my mom’s phone, then play it to a local and have them write it down. The French may call their numbers by different names but they write them the same way as we do. Once we found someone, they wrote down the number for us and we were able to contact the cottage’s owner, who let us in.

The cottage was right up on the Loire river, which was – you guessed it – flooded! So across the street from our door was a staircase that led down to some walkway, only because of the flooding it just went down into the water, where I saw quite a bit of wildlife – snails, lizards, and frogs alike. Some distance down from there was a statue of Leonardo Da Vinci, who is quite a big deal in Amboise, for reasons I’ll explain a little later.

 

The cottage itself was pretty nice, although people did keep stopping and hanging out in front of our door. Maybe it’s a local landmark or something. My bed was right next to the window, from which I had an excellent view of the castle across the river.

 

It should also be noted that of all the places we stayed during our trip, only one had screens on the windows. This wasn’t it. So when a local stray cat came by and decided he wanted in, he just jumped through our open windows, much to our surprise, and not really knowing what to do, we chased him back out. Turns out, his name is Gaspar, and locals generally feed him and let him stay in their houses, which is why he felt he could just come right in like he owned the place. No hard feelings, though – he posed nicely for me while I took a couple pictures!

   

My mom and I went up to the castle on our own, since my dad still wasn’t feeling up to it. Because the castle has a balcony area, we could see the cottage from up there, too.

      
   

The other main thing of note up there was the tiny chapel, where Leonardo Da Vinci was buried. You see, the French King was absolutely fascinated by what was going on with the Italian Renaissance, and invited Leonardo over to Amboise. Da Vinci, in turn, loved the place, and moved in at the nearby Clos Lucé for the last few years of his life, and expressed a desire to be buried at the castle. And so he was.

   

Speaking of Clos Lucé, that was our first stop the next day. This required driving, but that didn’t matter; Dad wouldn’t have missed this anyway. In addition to being a beautiful place, it had a museum with models of Da Vinci’s inventions, where Dad and I geeked out at length. Being the engineers we are, this consisted of discussing how the devices worked, the merits of the design choices, and how we’d improve or change the machines (with the technology of the time, of course). We’re that sort of people.

   

After that, we continued on to Chenonceau castle, known for being built on a bridge over the river Cher.

 

When we got there, we discovered that, yes, that one was flooded too. In fact, for me, this made the grounds more memorable than the castle itself. To get to the castle, you have to walk along a raised path through a forest, which is also home to the hedge maze. This forest was flooded, and the water was very still, so to both sides there was just an endless mirror with trees sprouting out of it, interrupted in one place by a half-sunken hedge maze. Closer to the castle, one of the two large gardens was also flooded (although the gates did help to keep the water out, so the garden was only partially so).

     

Of course, the interior was beautiful too – but you can see that any time you go there. The flooded forest, not so much. Much as we hated the perpetual rain and clouds, I’m glad I got to see that. The flooding made this trip all the more memorable.

     

We also planned to go to Chambord, but as we tried to get there, we kept having to turn around and go a different way due to various roads being closed. Eventually we stopped for lunch in a little town and found that, there too, we could go no further. So we gave up and went back to Amboise.

 

Incidentally, we wouldn’t have been able to see Chambord anyway. It was closed due to severe flooding.

The next day we drove to the train station and bid GLaDOS farewell, then boarded a train to Strasbourg, which, despite the name, is in fact in France. Barely. It’s right on the border with Germany. The weather was pretty nice while we were on the train, and I got a couple pictures out the window.

   

Like the one in Paris, the apartment we stayed in in Strasbourg had exposed beams, and was generally a very nice place, with, as usual, a nice view out the window.

 

As you can see, the nice weather continued for a while. Long enough to get several nice photos! That evening we went to see the cathedral, with its red stone, and took a batorama tour on the river, although on a different route than we had originally planned; the route we wanted was inaccessible due to flooding. Shocker. It was really a very nice tour, but unfortunately, the boat was not open, which meant that I couldn’t get good photos, since the glass was tinted and smudged, and slightly distorted things. I did, however, get a few good photos when we were in town looking at the cathedral.

     

The second day was spent just wandering around the town, taking pictures and enjoying the nice weather – while it lasted.

     
 

We had reservations to have dinner at a nice restaurant, but the bad weather rolled back in with a vengeance, and when we arrived there, we found the staff using a bucket to bail the building out. Needless to say, reservations were cancelled.

The next morning we boarded yet another train and set out for Germany.

We arrived in Stuttgart, but didn’t stay long or sightsee. We instead picked up our new rental car, a Volkswagen Passat wagon, and headed for Berchtesgaden, which would become my favorite place in the whole trip. Our GPS this time wasn’t trying to kill us, but it did turn out to be a complete moron, easily confused by parking lots, roundabouts, farmland, and construction work – and there’s a lot of construction work on German roads. In keeping with the theme, we switched its voice to the male, British voice and named it Wheatley.

We were supposed to stop and see Herrenchiemsee on the way, but my mom somehow mixed something up while planning the trip, and the plans were made on the assumption that the drive there from Stuttgart would take an hour and a half, when in fact it’s more like three and a half hours. Because of this, we ended up skipping that particular part of the trip and going straight to Berchtesgaden. We stayed in Apartment 6 of Haus Kunibert-Hain, which is up on a mountain and required driving up a series of twisty mountain roads, including one particularly bizarre intersection that confused Wheatley (and us the first couple times) every time we drove through it. We quickly learned to recognize this particular intersection and avoid the resultant wrong turns.

Kunibert-Hain was probably my favorite place in the whole trip, with the possible exception of our hotel in Colmberg, which as you will later see, definitely beat it out for “cool” factor. But this apartment really felt like a home, and it had the most fantastic view of all time.

       

Also, there were sheep in the field right next to it; I could see them from my room. To me, the sound of Bavaria will always be birds chirping, church bells ringing in the distance, and sheep bleating, the bells around their necks clanking softly. One of the ewes evidently gave birth while we were there, because we went outside one morning and there was a newborn lamb in the field. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get any good pictures of the cute little lamb, much less any that included enough scenery to merit posting here.

 

That first night, we went to a restaurant that really hammered the magic of the alps home. Also I learned that I like spätzle. But the best part of that place was definitely the atmosphere. We sat outside on sheepskins on a wooden bench, with a view of the mountains and the distinctly Bavarian houses. I don’t even remember what my main dish was, but I remember the environment around me very vividly.

 

Being up on a mountain, we couldn’t easily just walk out and get breakfast in the morning, which had been our standard routine until then, so we went to a nearby grocery store and bought some food for the apartment, since we’d be staying there for several days. It’s amazing how being in another country can make something as mundane as grocery shopping exotic and exciting. Tons of brands and even food types I didn’t recognize, and it goes without saying that there was the fact that everything was in German, so we didn’t really know what any of the labels on anything said. And there were so many kinds of sausages and wursts; I’m slightly miffed that my local grocery store in the US only has hot dogs and Italian sausages, save for one or two German sausages that I didn’t particularly care for. But I’m rambling, and the wonders of German food can’t be shared via the internet as readily as the sights and sounds.

Day two began with scrambled eggs and fried wurst slices, courtesy of my dad – okay, okay, I’ll stop talking about the food. After breakfast, we set out for the Berchtesgaden salt mines, which, while cool, were at the very bottom of the list of things I liked about the trip. It was somewhat tainted by the extreme trouble we had getting in. They don’t make it very clear to non-German-speaking guests what you’re supposed to do or where you’re supposed to go. We had bought our tickets beforehand, but ended up standing in the ticket purchasing line by mistake and missed the timestamp on our tickets, leading to a long and confusing debacle where we tried to explain the situation to the people working there and they tried to fix the problem, and let’s not dwell on that. It’s all become a blur of frustration and boredom in my mind anyway, and I’d rather keep it that way.

Eventually we got in, and took the little train-thing down to the innards of the salt works. That’s supposed to be fun, but straddling a little bench in a one-piece suit slightly too small for me, moving very quickly through a cramped, dark, spider-filled cave is not my idea of fun. I wasn’t scared, but I wasn’t enjoying it either, and mostly it just made me feel stressed out and unhappy. Once we were just walking around the larger, deeper chambers on foot it was better. They did a tour explaining all about salt mining, and it was pretty interesting. I didn’t much care for the famous slide, either, but the ride across the mirror lake was interesting, and they did a gorgeous light show. No pictures of the interior – I seem to recall they weren’t allowed, although that doesn't seem to have stopped the people on youtube. But I did take a picture of the river outside, showing off the characteristic, vivid blue of the water in the region.

 

The thing Berchtesgaden is most known for, of course, is that Hitler and many other high-ranking Nazis lived here. Hitler’s home was torn down, and rightly so, in my opinion. While normally I’m for the preservation of history, the fact that neo-nazis still regularly go to the spot where the house used to stand to leave flowers, etc., speaks to how dangerous it would have been to leave the building standing. Other historical buildings, less prone to cults-of-personality springing up within their walls, have been left in place, such as the Eagle’s Nest, which is now partially a restaurant. My family got a private tour of all of this, including the forest that now stands where Hitler’s house was, some Nazi bunkers, and areas of the Eagle’s Nest that are normally off-limits to tourists. Despite being at the very top of a mountain, we couldn’t see very much, because the weather was awful.

   

So we resolved to come back the next morning if the weather was good, and it was – in fact, that day gave us some of the best weather we had in the entire trip (which is to say, a full day without clouds and rain). And the view was spectacular. We also stopped for a drink and a snack at the restaurant itself, and met some very friendly alpine choughs who wanted to be fed.

     

After that, we continued with our original plan for the day, which was to drive to Hallstatt, Austria. Well, originally, it was to see the waterfall in Golling, and then proceed to Hallstatt, but that didn’t work out. We tried, but Wheatley kept trying to take us through a road that was closed for construction, and no matter how many times we told him “we can’t go there,” he would just reroute and take us down some wild, twisty route that eventually led right back to the construction. Eventually we managed to get him to stop trying to take us through construction.

He tried to take us into a cow pasture instead. It wasn’t even a road. It was a little dirt footpath through a cow pasture. And no, we weren’t misinterpreting the instructions. We zoomed in as far as the map would go and Wheatley really did want us to turn onto the cow path. So we decided the waterfall wasn’t worth it and just went straight to Hallstatt, though we did stop at a little stream along the way to get out and stretch our legs, and of course, take pictures.

 

Before we entered the town, we stopped for ice cream at a restaurant high up on the mountains around the lake. It was here that I discovered that in Germany and Austria, chocolate ice cream is amazingly creamy and actually tastes like chocolate. And from then on, I couldn’t get enough of the stuff – that and their equally mind-blowing caramel ice cream. Our inferior American ice cream makes me sad. Hallstatt itself is a tiny town on a massive lake, and we rented a boat to spend some time out there, enjoying the views, including the mysterious castle on the opposite shore.

     
   

After our lovely day on the lake, we headed back to Berchtesgaden for dinner, to confirm that, despite my love of spätzle and various wursts, wienerschnitzel just isn’t my thing. I did, however, discover a love of schweinebraten in dark beer sauce- there I go, talking about the food again.

The next day can best be summed up as “Alpine Road Trip,” driving from one location to the next. The first stop was Wimbachklamm Gorge. It was raining again, our good weather having passed, but it was beautiful all the same. Required quite a hike though.

       

From there we moved on to Ramsau, to see its famous church. I’m pretty sure we failed to recreate the famous shot by virtue of standing on the wrong bridge (two different wrong bridges, in fact), but the pictures turned out nicely nonetheless.

   

We then proceeded to Salzburg, Austria, where we totally ignored all the Mozart stuff. There was a cute little shop that does photos in the style of 1900, so I got all dressed up in period clothing and got my picture taken, which was interesting. We took a horse carriage ride around the town – you can actually tell the locals from the tourists by how they react to a horse-drawn carriage stopped at a traffic light. Tourists are surprised and amused; locals are unfazed or annoyed, depending on whether they’re on foot or in a car. And of course, we visited the castle.

   

And after that long and tiring day, we went back to Berchesgaden for the last time.

The next morning we set out for our next base of operations, Hohenschwangau, but we made a couple stops along the way. The first of these was Mittenwald, a standard Bavarian town, which was quite pleasant. We took a funicular up to the top of the mountain, where it was cold, icy, and generally inhospitable. Being the sort of person who gets cold very easily, I didn’t like it much up there.

     

Next up was Ettal Monastery, which was knock-your-socks-off gorgeous. Here, we got stopped by the world’s chattiest priest, who we had a rather difficult time understanding, and an even harder time getting away from.

     

After we finally got away, we set out on the final leg of the day’s journey. It went smoothly until we were almost to our destination, and found that the road was closed for construction. The only other way was to go all the way around the lake. Naturally, Wheatley kept trying to take us back through the construction, but eventually we got him to give us a path around the lake. At one point we had to stop briefly because someone was herding some cows down the road, and once we got to Hohenschwangau, we couldn’t figure out where to park, but we did get it worked out.

Now, you may have heard of towns that “shut down at night,” but nothing quite like Hohenschwangau. When they say the whole town shuts down at night, they mean it literally. In the late evening, the hotel we stayed in and its associated restaurant are the only things open. It becomes a total ghost town. Even other restaurants close. It was very strange. But the hotel itself was pretty nice, and my room had a view of Neuschwanstein Castle, the famous castle built by Mad King Ludwig, also known as the Fairy Tale King – not the best view, but a view.

 

Speaking of which, we went there the next day. We took a bus up to its normal drop-off point, which is near the bridge all the famous pictures of the castle are taken from, but it was closed for construction (which was, by the way, supposed to be finished by the time we arrived, but has been delayed). Then we walked down the rest of the way to the castle. The interior of the castle was absolutely gorgeous, but unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take pictures. You can only get in as part of a tour group, and they forbid photography in order to prevent traffic jams. No such prohibitions for the exterior, however.

     

We then took a horse-drawn carriage back down the mountain into town, and from there we drove to Wies to see the Wieskirche, which the chatty priest at Ettal had advised us to do (but was already in our plans anyway). Much to my surprise, it was a farm town, with horses out in front of the church, and chickens in a pen nearby. But once inside, it was every bit as stunning as Ettal.

     

After that, we called it a day and went back to our ghost town for dinner. The next day we went to see the other castle in the town, Hohenschwangau Castle, the childhood home of King Ludwig. It, too, was spectacular, and it, too, had a no-photography policy. Once again, this didn’t apply to the exterior, so I got a few pictures outside while the sun lasted.

       

Having nothing else to do inside the town, we added an unplanned stop to our trip, and headed out to another of King Ludwig’s projects, Linderhof. Once again, no pictures were allowed inside the castle, but that didn’t apply to the Grotto or the castle grounds, which were spectacular in their own right, especially because, though it was rainy when we arrived, when we came out of the Grotto, it was sunny!

     
     

The next day, we left for Colmberg Castle, where we would be staying the night! On the way, we stopped briefly in Dinkelsbuhl. It didn’t rain the entire way there, and was even sunny, but once we got there, no sooner did we step out of the car than it began pouring. My mom finally snapped and had a bit of a breakdown because she was so sick of the rain ruining things or just plain making life difficult, so we just decided to skip Dinkelsbuhl and go straight to the castle.

When we got there, though, we were in for a few surprises. My mom had booked two separate rooms – one for her and my dad, and one for just me, both furnished appropriately for the setting, like the rest of the castle. Neither were quite ready when we got there, so we just waited around for a while.

     
   

Eventually they told us that the room for one person was ready. They took us up to show us… the honeymoon suite. It was all red and pink, and the headboard of the bed was a red leather heart. Not what I had in mind – and besides that, they had one room booked for a married couple, and one room booked for a young woman clearly staying alone, so what were they thinking when they put the lone woman in the honeymoon suite?!

But we didn’t give up hope just yet, figuring that the other room would be more what we wanted, and we could swap. When it was ready, they brought us up to show us… a perfectly normal, sleek, modern hotel room. It was a nice room, and in any other hotel we would have been pleased. But why would you book a room in a castle if you just wanted a normal hotel room? I can’t put the disappointment into words. I didn’t want to say anything; I was already getting to stay in a castle. But my mom knew I was disappointed and spoke up, especially since these rooms looked nothing like the ones booking.com had showed her. She even showed the printed paperwork from the site to the people who run the hotel, and they found us another room, one they called the Chinese room because the furniture inside, while fitting with the castle’s style, was clearly influenced by Asian styles. I loved the room, and the view it had of the courtyard. As a bonus, it was just down the hall from the honeymoon suite, which my parents stayed in.

 

Of course, there’s not much to do in Colmberg, other than just wander around the castle, so mostly we spent the day relaxing. I sat on the bed playing Age of Empires II most of the day. Remember how I said only one place we stayed in had screens over the windows? This was also not it, resulting in my parents having an encounter with what my dad dubbed “Bee-zilla,” which flew in through the window. My parents closed the curtains over it to encourage it to fly out of the room instead of trying to kill it, which turned out to be a smart move, because my googling later on suggested that what they saw was probably a European Hornet – classified as an endangered, protected species in Germany, with a €50,000 fine for killing one.

The next morning, we departed from our castle and moved on to Rothenburg. We got there early, so we just wandered the town for a while before going back to the hotel to see if our room was ready. It wasn’t, but I guess we must have looked tired, because they upgraded us to a five bed apartment, which was absolutely huge. And it had screens on the windows, which meant I couldn’t get a decent picture of the view. After bringing our luggage in and resting a while to wait for the largest crowds of tourists to pass, we continued our exploration of the town.

       

My mom and aunt both own Christmas ornaments they bought at Käthe Wohlfahrt in Rothenburg, so naturally this was my turn to do so, if rather reluctantly; it’s summer, so I don’t exactly feel the Christmas spirit. But I did find a few orbs I liked. Personally, I was more interested in the other stores Rothenburg had to offer. There was a rock and fossil store where I bought a rainbow ammonite, and several shops selling swords and other such things that appealed to me (and of course, I did buy a sword).

After that it was time to take the Night Watchman Tour. Our guide was pretty funny, and my dad bought a DVD the guy made with extra commentary.

 

When the tour was over, he encouraged us to go walk the city walls. It took us some time to find the stairs up onto the walls, but we got there eventually.

   

Our final day, we set out for Stuttgart airport, and stopped on the way to see the ruins of Heidelburg Castle. We ended up looking at the Pharmacy Museum while we were there, because it was in the castle and we wanted to get out of the rain. It’s pretty safe to say that while we had a great time, we were exhausted and ready to go home by then.

     

In Stuttgart, we stayed at an airport hotel, had one last German meal at a restaurant in the airport (which had a life size Diplodocus statue temporarily(?) outside as an ad for the local museum), and departed the next morning, business class, back to the US, stopping over in Seattle and then flying home. What an adventure!