After a good nights sleep in the cabin, we were off on our first scheduled tour. We headed to Neuschwanstein Castle. Neuschwanstein castle is rumored to be the castle that Walt Disney used as inspiration for Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland. The real castle is absolutely breathtaking and it is easy to see why Walt fell in love with it.
We started off our day by eating at the breakfast buffet, Market Station. For the five of us it was $32. The food was nice and after living in England for a year it was nice to indulge in some American favorites like biscuits and gravy and pancakes.
Here is a picture of the view from the front of Edelweiss Resort and Lodge.
From there we met our tour guide in the lobby. We boarded the bus about 8:25 and were off pretty close to our start time of 8:30 am.
The tour makes two stops on the way to the castle. First at the Ammertal Wood Carving Shop. This is a lovely shop that you can purchase hand made woodcarvings or a beautiful Black Forest Cuckoo Clock. We had about 35 minutes to tour the store. The second stop is the WieBKirche pilgrimage church. Here the bus stops for about 40 minutes and you can tour the church and grabs some fresh hot donuts and coffee. There are also a couple of shops you can visit. The stops are a great way to break up the 1-½ hour journey to the castle.
Once at the castle you make your way up to the Castle by either hiking, taking a bus, or a horse drawn carriage. On the day that we went we were very lucky to be using the tour guide as tickets for the tour when we arrived about 11:30 were being sold for the 7:30 pm tours and were sold out completely by 1:30 pm. The little town at the base of the castles were packed. Thankfully our tour guide had prescheduled a small mini bus for 2 Euros for adults and 1 Euros for children so we were able to skip the long queues and head up the mountain.
Once at the top of the mountain we visited the newly reopened bridge overlooking the castle. The sites and picture opportunities from the bridge are amazing. Make sure you leave time to check it out.
We then toured the castle. The tour itself is about 30 minutes with the last part being self-guided. You cannot take pictures in the castle. The kids enjoyed the tour partly because it was short and sweet. We have toured a lot of castles since moving to Europe and this one was at the top of our list.
We then hiked back down the mountain and met our tour guide for lunch at a restaurant he reserved some tables at. We ate at Café Kainz and the portions were very large. The traditional German food was delicious.
We explored a couple of more shops and were back to the tour bus at 3:30 pm. We arrived back to Edelweiss at approximately 4:50.
We loved every minute of our day and for us it was totally worth booking the tour.
Around the World with the Love of Five 
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