Tuesday 12 August 2003. After yesterday's sun, Mum is feeling the effects and so Mum and Dad opt to stay at the hotel for the day whilst Fran and I go on the planned trip which is to Chiemsee and the Palace of 'Mad' King Ludwig.
Our coach for the day is one of those double decker coaches and we manage to bag the front seats. We watch the archway approach with some interest...
Chiemsee is a large lake - the see part of the name means lake as in Achensee, Zell-am-See etc. See? Oops, sorry! Anyway, as soon as we arrive, we are herded gently onto a boat to cross to the island of Herreninsel.
This is home to Herrenchiemsee, an exact copy of the Palace of Versailles near Paris where in the 1600s King Louis XIV of France had turned a simple hunting lodge into a grand palace. When I say "exact" it was not altogether a strictly accurate copy. For one thing it was never finished - the wings are non-existent and as it dates from the advantage of a couple of hundred years after Versailles, it has a few upgrades, not the least being some electric lighting.
Ludwig was Ludwig II, King of Bavaria from 1864 and Herrenchiemsee was just one of several extravagant castles and palaces that he spent his entire fortune and some not inconsiderable borrowed funds upon. Because of this he was declared insane, taken into custody, deposed as king in June 1886 and the following day was found dead of supposed suicide. If it was suicide it killed his doctor too on the same day...
The copy of Versailles extended into the gardens, the statuary, the fountains and the canal. At Versailles the canal extends to a small artificial lake at its far end. At Herrenchiemsee it ends by opening out into the lake Chiemsee.
The time came to return to the boat and it was a very full load of people that returned back to our starting point.
As we walked from the pier back towards the waiting coach, we noticed rails set into the roadway. There were no overhead lines and we half expected a horse-drawn tram, but it was a full-blown train that arrived!
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