Herrenchiemsee

Our next Sunday day-trip took us to Herrenchiemsee, King Ludwig II's second most famous exercise in castle-building run-amok (the first being the incomparable Neuschwanstein). Inspired by a visit to Versailles, the King decided to build his own version on a wooded island in the Chiemsee, about an hour outside of Munich. His goal was apparently to outdo the opulence of the original. While the exterior of the castle did little to make us forget Versailles, the handful of rooms Ludwig finished before his untimely death in 1886 were dazzling indeed. But you'll have to trust us on that, as no photography was allowed inside.



After visiting the castle, we took the ferry to nearby Fraueninsel, a village that seemed barely afloat upon the lake, where we enjoyed a tasty fish lunch. The only jarring note in this idyllic scene was the church cemetery, where we unexpectedly came across the tomb of Gen. Alfred Jodl, hanged at Nuremberg in 1946 for war crimes. I guess they had to put it somewhere.