The famous "Neuschwanstein" castle, built by crazy King Ludwig II in a time when there was no longer a strategic advantage to building castles that could be destroyed by modern artillery. Ludwig was one of the last of the Wittelsbach family to reign over Bavaria, the longest dynasty in Europe lasting almost one thousand years! I think he built it 1) for the future economy of Bavaria since it takes in tens of millions of Euros every summer from tourists who line up for hours to pay 9 Euros for a short tour or 2) to get women. Girls love castles. The more beautiful the castle the more girls are into them. Ludwig never married though. He might have been too busy building his castle and he also wasn't deemed fit to rule, so his uncle ruled the Kingdom in his stead while Ludwig spent the family fortune building several ridiculously expensive vacation castles around southern Bavaria. Around 40 he was found dead in Lake Starnberg near Munich, drowned under suspicious circumstances.
Looking out of Neuschwanstein towards Hohenschwangau, the family's more modest castle who Ludwig's father had built after discovering the ruins of a previous castle upon a hill. This castle was very nice as well. We especially liked the Turkish bedroom of the King with a secret passage to his wife's chambers. It seems back then husbands and wives of nobility didn't sleep in the same bed.
This lake is near the base of Zugspitze, the highest peak in Germany. It is great fun driving along the winding switch back roads through the Alps!
This is Karlsruhe, which means "Karl's rest". The city was built by orders of King Karl, after he fell asleep in the woods here on a hunting trip and decided it was so nice that he should build a city. The city is extremely well organized with 36 or so streets radiating from the central palace. This picture is looking west towards France across the Rhine river and the Rhine Graben (= grave in German). A graben is where the earth is being pulled apart and infilled with sediment, in this case the sediment is coming from the Black Forest and the Swiss Alps. France is slowly drifting away from Germany. Depending on which German you talk to, this may be good thing ;-)
The Rhine Graben is part of the large European Cenozoic Rift System, along which one finds extinct volcanoes with plains of basalts and historical earthquakes such as the 1356 Basel earthquake which flattened buildings 250 km away (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Rhine_Plain).
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