Fussen-Cologne Day 1 Part 1

I slept in while RL woke up earlier and took a morning walk with JB. She grabbed the camera and went on a photo safari.

Blue skies with no clouds today, nice.

Ski ramps.

A small lake located just around our hotel.

This whole area is lined with hiking paths. In retrospect, we should have probably spent another day in Fussen and devote a day to hiking.

They found these giant slugs. This one had a hole on its side…strange.

MOSS!!!

Found a putt-putt course on the way back.

And the first chance I get at the camera after RL comes back, instead of taking a photo of something beautiful, I take a photo of the toilet. I hate these German toilets where the water level is really low and worst of all, the drain is towards the front instead of the back of the toilet. I complain because every time you shit, the poop hits the porcelain without fail and you need to use the toilet brush every time. Design fail!

OK, there’s JB. We checked out of our hotels and are planning on storing our packs at the lockers in the main train station. Then from there, we’ll be taking a cable car to the top of the mountain for a nice view before we head to Cologne. It’ll be a 6 hour train ride from Fussen to Cologne, so we are trying to head out of Fussen earlier rather than later in the afternoon.

Crazy water color.

This is so vibrant it almost looks fake. Non of these photos are photo shopped by the way.

And….all the lockers are in use. Shit!!! We came by last night to check them and there were a few open, but they are all gone now. Should have hedged our bets last night and paid extra 3 Euros to put dibs onto one last night. Now what…

We scramble around frantically trying to see if there are more lockers around or if the bike rental shop next door would hold our packs. RL said that she’ll sit in a cafe and watch our packs while JB and I go up the cable car. Leave no (wo)man behind!!

As we stood around getting more stressed about the situation, a small locker becomes available and we ended up storing RL’s main pack and all of our day packs into the locker. We’ll just have to haul up JB’s main pack and my main pack up the mountain now. I guess this is better than nothing.

We approach the buses that will take us to the cable car. Supposedly, either bus line will take us to the cable car. As we centered the bus, I reached into my pocket for change to pay, and realized that we didn’t have enough coins for the ride!! Fuck!! We were so distracted by the locker situation that we forgot to get more coins for the bus ride. So we had to get off the bus and run around trying to get change from shops.

I ran to the train platform to see if I can just buy a bus ticket on the ticket machine. The ticket office was closed since it’s Saturday. Fuck fuck fuck!!! This is definitely the most out of sorts I’ve felt all trip. We are trying to get our change before the buses leave and it’ll be God knows how long until the next buses show up.

Finally on the bus!! It’s super crowded and I have no room to move with my big pack on my back, but that’s ok, we made it!! We literally made it as the driver put the bus into Drive and then we waved for him to let us on.

We get to the stop for the castles, and we wanted to stay on the bus for the next stop which is supposed to be the cable cars. Well, our bus driver informs us that this bus does not go there, but instead points across at another bus that would take us there!!! Shit!!! This means we’ll need to pay for another ride with coins that we don’t have in our pockets. As we frantically walk around trying to find shops to get change, the bus heading to the cable car pulls away. Fuck!!! Now…calm down and think.

We spotted a taxi, and we figured that with the three of us splitting the fare, we’ll only need to pay about maybe 5 Euros more vs. all three paying bus fare. There we go, taxi it is from here to the cable car!!

The scenery seems beautiful again now that we are not as stressed riding in this comfortable taxi.

Dropped off at the cable car ticket office. Nice. That’s a hectic morning, but we made it, despite several hiccups.

Lines are not too long, nice. We were worried about the potential long lines here that would delay us getting back into Fussen to catch our train. Speaking of long lines, there were hordes of people visiting Neuschwanstein today. Good thing we visited it yesterday, because there may have been so many people there today that we may have had to wait until late in the afternoon for a tour time, if we could get one at all.

Resting my heavy pack on the railing for some relief. It’s actually quite a bit smaller than it was for the Asian trip, there’s quite a bit of empty space in there.