Neuschwanstein castle often called the fairy tale castle is very well known. Hohenschwangau Castle is considered as the smaller less beautiful castle but still worth visiting as they are generally part of the tour ticket you buy. From Frankfurt, the drive to Fussen where both of the fairy tale castle are located will take around 4 hours. Quite a long but still worth the effort. Recommend to be done as a 2 days trip with few stops in between.

The tourist village was set away from the towns so that the downtowns themselves didn’t get overrun, allowing there to be a whole village built complete with huge restaurants and fast food imbisses, souvenir stores, and a massive ticketing center for the visitors.      

After buying the ticket, we didn’t walk straight to the Neuschwanstein Castle, but to the nearby Hohenschwangau castle, which serve as a secondary castle in the village. We should visit the less ‘magnificent’ castle before the more ‘magnificent’ castle, in order to keep a high mood all the time. 

 Hohenschwangau Castle is a 19th century castle in southern Germany. It was the childhood residence of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and was built by his father, King Maximilian II of Bavaria. *    

Hohenschwangau was the official summer and hunting residence of Maximilian, his wife Marie of Prussia and their two sons Ludwig (the later King Ludwig II of Bavaria) and Otto (the later King Otto I of Bavaria). The young princes spent many years of their adolescence here.

King Maximilian died in 1864 and his son Ludwig succeeded to the throne, moving into his father’s room in the castle. As Ludwig never married, his mother Marie was able to continue living on her floor. King Ludwig enjoyed living in Hohenschwangau, especially after 1869 when the building of his own castle, Neuschwanstein, began only a stone’s throw from his parental home. After Ludwig’s death in 1886 Queen Marie was the castle’s only resident until she in turn died in 1889.

This castle had surprised me, it looks very modern. Isn’t castle suppose to look very old and spooky, like the castles in England? Ok, I must clear the stereotype perception about castles.    

The way the tickets worked was noteworthy. Anyone visiting for a quick dash up to the castles will be disappointed. Both castles require guided tours, and the tours are assigned (one could not pick and choose the time). Tours began every five minutes with certain tours being conducted in English and special tours available in certain other languages. On average, the assigned tour would begin about one to two hours after the time of the ticket purchased. While that sounded like a lot of time, in fact it wasn’t. Getting to the castle could take the whole time.

Our tour was scheduled at 10.15 am, still have 20 minutes to go.    

While waiting, there was nothing much to do at the courtyard except taking photos here and there…  

So much time there that I could set my camera to auto shot mode…and took pictures for ourselves to kill time.  

When our time came, we walked over to the other side of the castle, and waited there for another 10 min.

Finally we were leaded to go in to the 1st room in the castle. Of course, everything inside the castle are priceless antiques. The visitors are not allowed to touch anything. Also, photography and video recording is strictly prohibited.  

Anyway, I risk-my-life to snap a few photos when the condition was safe to do so (hehe…).
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Most of the rooms are very spectacular, especially the paintings on the wall. In the eyes of a layman (like me), every paintings in the rooms are so beautiful, like created by Michael Langero, OK.   Vincent was actually trying to decipher the paintings on the wall. In one room, I think he has cracked the story behind the painting. Amazing.   We left after around 1 hour. Now we were excited for the next castle – the fairy tale castle