Our days were pretty flexible, we knew we wanted to go to Neuschwanstein, to Triberg, and that was about it. We had investigated a few places like Rothenburg/ Rottenburg, maybe going to Salzburg in Austria and seeing the sound of music filming location, or maybe Basel to go to Switzerland. We did a lot of this planning Sunday and Monday. We each only had 3 travel days on our tickets, so we would have to figure out which three we wanted to do. Sunday night, we ended up staying up a little late trying to find out these things. It turns out we were all confused about Rothenburg and Rottenburg (They pronounced identically) and some people had heard about one and some about the other, it turns out that we weren't going to visit either. The prettier one was apparently like 6 hours away, while the other one was just a little industrial place. After all that, my sister also mentioned that, if we went to Rot(t/h)enburg, it would be a 4th day and we would have to pay extra for the travel. We ended up deciding for the next day to go to a large local brewery and try to take a tour.
We were then down to the third travel day: Basel, Switzerland or Salzburg, Austria. While Austria would be amazingly beautiful and we could also see some of the filming locations for the Sound of Music and lots of neat things; however I remembered that Switzerland is known for its cheese fondue and their chocolate. I mentioned this, and that Salzburg was further away and the tour was very early in the day, it sounded like everyone was game. Then we quickly went over time frames for the next few days and decided we would figure the things the closer we got to the date.
Back to the actual Monday.
We took a tram to the brewery, which wasn't too far away, luckily because it was starting to drizzle and was quite humid (good thing we didn't schedule something more exciting for the day). We arrived at the large brewery and I went up to the gate and spoke with the security lady. She said there were absolutely no tours for the public. It sounded like we would need special permission and a special guide. Oops! We decided we would just settle for the restaurant right next door to sample the local specialty. Eichbaum, I believe is a type of tree, depending on who you ask it's pronounced "EYE-sh bao-mm" or "Eye-[hiss like a cat kind of] bao-mm". I think I had already eaten something for lunch (We went to a baeckerei (Bakery) called BackWerk almost every day, it seemed)
After we sat down and flipped through the menu, everyone ordered their respective drinks with the help of Chris, who my mother and aunt turned to as their own personal beer expert. They each ordered the Eichbaum pilsner, while my sister and I ordered water [beer is gross, we agree], and Chris ordered their winter beer, which they didn't have and ended up getting something red. After looking a little more, my aunt ordered soup, Chris ordered fries and Jackie saw they had lemonade. It's called "Braumeisters Limonade" or the brewer's lemonade. I had seen advertisements around town for it, and the bottles are really cool. I'm sad I forgot to take it. We also saw that there was a Bierprobe, a beer sampler [pictured]. I don't recall what they all were; I want to saw there were some lagers, pilsners and a hefeweiser. Each of the samples were pretty good size so we were each able to try it.
It was cool because after everyone would try it, Chris would explain what he knew about the beer and the type of beer. It was also interesting that the beer that my mom and aunt hated was the one that my sister and I could actually stand! And vice versa. It turns out that she and I liked the Hefeweiser, a more "feminine beer". I don't think I could every drink a whole glass though. Another experience was the lemonade. It was fermented, carbonated, and wasn't very sweet. It lived up to its name. It reminded me of beer, but was lemonade so it was quite a bit more bearable. As we were about to leave, I noticed the servers were leaving eggs at everyone's tables, finally we received some. I had no idea what it was, for Easter, but were they edible? Who knew, we took a few of the colorful eggs back to our place to figure it out later. As we were leaving, I noticed a light fixture... it was interesting.
The eggs were pretty. I think the rest of the day we were mostly relaxing and planning. We also ordered pizza from a local shop. I was so hungry that I just ate my baked potato from the other day. Still delicious. We received everything, large water bottles included. We forgot to check that it was still water when ordering it, it wasn't. My mom was the only one who could mostly stand it, especially because it was classic, meaning it was extra carbonated. I left one of the bottles open and shook it everyday, it stayed fizzy. -.- The next day was our adventure to Neuschwanstein!
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