Route for day 2:
We both woke up early due to jetlag and decided to get a head start on the day. After a phenomenal hotel breakfast we got in the car and headed to the spot. You know which one I’m talking about of course, this one:
As others have previously mentioned, you do have to drive a couple hundred feet down a one-way road in the wrong direction to get this photo. But it’s in the middle of open pastures so you can easily see if someone is coming, so it didn’t end up being a big deal. After getting about 50 different pictures at the spot, we drove a few minutes to Neuschwanstein Castle. There were throngs of tourists and tour buses everywhere, which made parking a bit of an ordeal. Eventually, we made it through all the people walking in the street and found an extremely empty parking lot, I think it was about 6 euros to park there.
The weather was perfect for hiking at this time (cool and crisp around 65 degrees if I were to guess) so we skipped to long line for the shuttle and decided to hike up instead. I highly recommend this as it only took about 20 minutes or so and the path was well-traveled up a paved maintenance road.
At the castle, neither of us were interested in waiting in line to go inside so we got all the pictures we wanted outside and headed back down. This would become a recurring trend during our trip; if we weren’t 100% intent on spending time at some place to see or do some particular thing, I leaned on the side of not seeing/doing it so that I could get back to driving my car sooner.
We got back to the main road taking a slightly different path down and then oh boy! I thought it was crowded before? It was just after 10am now and there were tourists everywhere! It was at this point we decided to continue or trend of waking up early with jetlag and doing all the touristy things early because this was just a mess.
After a little maneuvering through parked tour buses we were back on the road and heading into Austria. I had purchased the vignette the previous day at the very first autobahn rest stop I saw with the vignette sign. You can’t miss them, so don’t fret about where to get vignettes before your trip. For Austria, the 10-day vignette worked perfectly for us. Note that there are very specific instructions on the back of the vignette regarding where to place it on the windshield and you must follow that exactly or risk getting pulled over.
The A7 into Austria at this point was closed for some reason due to police activity, which gave us an excuse to take the side roads. Our next stop was just over the border at a place called Highline 179. This is a very tall, very long suspension bridge over a valley with two castle ruins at each end. It was a decent hike up on each side (about 30 minutes and steep).
The actual suspension bridge was a bit scary at the beginning but it was much more stable in the middle. On the way down, it started to rain. A lot. We rushed down to the car and got on the road to Innsbruck.
On the way to Innsbruck, I had planned a detour to drive the Hahntennjoch pass in Austria. I found this when broswing ultimatedrives.net’s “Top 10 Roads”
here.
The rain wasn’t showing any signs of letting up but I was determined not to miss this specifically-planned detour. When we got to the start of the pass, several motorbikes whizzed by heading up the hairpin turns. If they were still going, it must be safe, right?
After the pass, we merged onto the Austrian autobahn and before we long we were in Innsbruck. Our hotel for the night was Hilton Innsbruck, courtesy 20k or so Hilton points. There was a gigantic, mostly empty parking lot below the hotel with several nice Porsches so I found a nice spot with walls on both sides and let the M240i take a well-earned rest for the night.
