Prague, Salzburg, & Munich – 1999

First trip to Eastern Europe – a work friend highly recommended Prague and I was able to use some of my frequent flyer miles on British Airways from all of my India trips. We connected through London and a couple days before my trip I found that there was an executive meeting in London to review the strategy, so I “volunteered” to present my portion in person and go a couple of days early.. Ended up being a factor in ultimately getting a job in London later that year. After the presentation we went out for a very late night (same friends fault) and I overslept picking Sharon up at Heathrow (pre-cell phone) and was running to the tube a couple of hours late when she came out of the tube and we happened to run into each other on the street. She knew my hotel and tube stop and just figured we’d run into each other, so no harm no foul and the vacation started.

We spent a day in London which ended up being important to Sharon as she was able to see the city so when I got the opportunity for a job, she was comfortable in making the move. The next morning we flew to Prague, which was our first stop.

Prague

Prague lived up to the billing, we were lucky to visit before Prague became “cool”. Stayed in a place in the city and walked everywhere the entire time and visited all the tourist site.  I was lucky to find pictures of all the different sites and one thing I have learned going to this exercise is that “incidents” do make trips memorable.  In Prague I don’t have any specific recollection other than it was a great place to go and I knew would want to go back someday….but still haven’t been yet. Must mean that we had no “incidents”.

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Bavarian Castles

After leaving Prague, for some reason we went to Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany first instead of Salzburg.  Neuschwanstein Castle was one of several castles in Bavaria that we visited and was built only about 140 years ago by King Ludwig II. He was kind of a crazy guy and fancied himself a futurist – as you can see from the pictures Neuschwanstein Castle was the basis for the ultimate Disneyland and Disney World castles. Inside it was kind of weird and had secret rooms, it was more a replica of the most extravagant things from other castles as when it was built in the late 1800’s, no other castles were being built,  We also went by his boyhood castle, Hohenschwangau Castle which is only a couple miles away as well as a Poellat Gorge Waterfall.  We also went to  as well as Linderhof Palace that he built and finished with a hike to Ehrenburg Ruins which was across the border in Austria. Of course there was no German and Austrian border and back then it was just Bavaria and was a place that it’s always been a home to kings.

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Salzburg

From Ehrenburg we drove to Salzburg, all I really remember was that it rained the whole time and we went to a couple free Mozart concerts in churches.  The same friend who told me that Prague was a great place to go (which was correct) also told me that the salt mines and the slides the workers took to get to the mines was coolest thing ever in his life.  So we did the salt mine slides and unfortunately I don’t have a picture of us in our salt mine gear as we slide down long wooden slides to get down to the mine.  Was ok, but not the coolest thing ever – so when I returned to the USA, I mentioned that is was observation – he admitted that he was only about seven.

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Munich

From Salisbury then drove to Munich and found glorious sunshine and we spent most of our time just bopping around the city in the parks and ended taking a bike tour around the city. Of course we had to take the pilgrimage to the Hofbrau Haus – were no Germans were there but lots of people from everywhere else so that was pretty fun too. 

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(This was written during the Great Shutdown of 2020 and if there’s huge fat foot below me, it not my fault – that an advertisement I can’t control).