Well, thanks so much for the lovely comments guys - I'll catch up with each of you at the end - not too far to go now (at least with this story, I've got a 11 hour flight tonight and my stomach is crying out for breakfast)
Day 15 (Thursday)Another peaceful night - that is the advantage of these camping locations that tend to be frequented by the motorhome brigade - they tend to be more independent travelers who don't stay long in one place (apart from the guy with the cat that is) and are just in couples, so no groups of noisy children running around your camp site or noisy drunken adults shouting until the early hours.
From our camp ground it is about a 30 minute drive to this - something everyone has seen on biscuit tins, jigsaw puzzles, or copied by a certain giant cartoon corporation:
As you drive along the road south-east towards it you see breaks in the trees and looking through them across the meadows this towers above - in the shade because this side is south-facing. Schloss Neuscwanstein.
Europe is full of castles, many around 1000 years old. But this is an exception to the norm. A modern castle - effectively a fortified house built in a romantic castle style. Young King Ludwig II of Bavaria loved Wagner and spent huge amounts of money building castles to evoke Wagner's operas.
The location is lovely - sat on the edge of the mountain range that borders with Austria and looking north towards the rest of Germany.
Arriving here we are definitely on the main tourist trail. The village below has many car parks and you can take horse carriage rides up to the castle. It is a fairly steep walk from the village and getting on for 1km long.
Once at the entrance they have a timed system of escorted tours, so you wait around for your number to appear:
A lot of money was spent on this project, but construction was halted in 1892 (see what I mean about modern). Consider that this is the same period as the rebuilding after the great fire of Chicago, and the buildings erected in that era were steel-framed sky scrapers (at least sky scrapers for their time), so put in that context this 'castle' looks odd.
Also, used as I am to touring castles decorated in the middle-ages, the decoration of this castle is interesting - it contains a lot of fancy decoration (some in the fashionable middle-eastern style of the time) but not to the fine level of detail employed during the middle ages.
If you carry on walking past the castle there is a bridge you can stand on to get a more famous view of it. This picture doesn't show how crowded that bridge was though - every inch packed with people squeezing past trying to get a picture or a selfie:
We retreat to the camper and head west for the edge of Germany, making use of the autobahns, relieved to be somewhere quiet again.
Oh look, an arch crying out to be driven through:
We just fit.
We have got further than I expected today, so time to find a camp ground. I set the GPS for an area that on the map appears to have nice hills and forest, so hopefully we can find a campground there. Looking in advance I found one on the GPS labelled 'Nature's Friend' in German. I am a bit suspicious since that does sound worryingly like a naturist site (which is the polished term for nudist I guess). If being naked in public is your thing then that is fine, but I tend to feel most people look less off-putting with their clothes on. I suspect the exception to that rule is the sort of people who don't stay at naturist sites (having never attended one myself I can't say, I just have the suspicion that athletes and models are probably in short supply in such places).
We drive around the hills, but don't see any sign of a campground. Then Sally spots a sign and we follow it - it is indeed Nature's Friend campground. OK, we'll check it out. It turns out not to be a naturist site (phew), and it doesn't look too bad, but has a lot of static trailer homes. We elect to stay for 2 nights because we want to have a day off from driving before we return home.
