The title of this particular entry is somewhat misleading, as we didn`t go inside Schloss Neuscwanstein or go as fast as the car would. Anyway, artistic merit etc.
Neuschwanstein is a big castle in the south of Germany - it was half built by Ludwig II of Bavaria before he died in 1886 and finished off in something of a hurry subsequently. It`s plausibly claimed to be the castle that Disney modeled their Disneyland ones upon, and implausibly claimed to be the most photographed building in the world. Kiki and I have actually been here before, but when we arrived the castle was shut for renovation. So here we are back again. There`s a rather steep twenty minute walk up to the castle and from the entrance you can either go inside (if you`ve paid), or wander around the grounds (what we did). There were hordes of tourists everywhere, so we ate some lunch, pootled around the grounds taking a couple of photographs and then nipped off again.
As we`d gone all of ten kilometres into Germany, it seemed rude not to zoom the car up and down the autobahn a bit, as it doesn`t look like we`ll be back in Germany at all during this trip. There was rather a lot of traffic and I wasn`t overly keen to blow anything up, but it would appear it does 220kmh on the speedo, which was over 210 on the GPS (the speedo is remarkeably accurate). It whooshed up to that really quite speedily so I suspect it would probably do 230 or 240. At that it would be redlining in fourth, which is interesting - I expected top to be geared a bit lower. I realise the photo isn`t of 220 at all, but I had a degree of trouble getting the photographer to stop squeaking and take the thing.
Once we got back to our lovely wifi caravan site... erm, I mean, our lovely caravan site with the superb views and excellent facilities... the car informed me that it was about time it was serviced, so we`ll have to start looking into the easiest way to go about doing that. I`m not sure if they still do this, but at the time our floating sofa was made BMW had a system whereby the car decided when it needed to be serviced based on how hard its life had been. It was last serviced at 93k miles and we`re still under 100k, but I suspect that towing the caravan rather bumps up its "hard life" counter. Perhaps it`s not that sophisticated. Perhaps it has an autobahn detector.
Distance travelled: 6001km car, 1115km train
Books read: C:3, K:6
Bottles of wine remaining: 1
Countries visited: 6 (UK, France, Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein, Germany)