A Trip through Culture Spots in Germany - 8
Berg and Benediktbeuern

Monday 11th September 2000

Noisier than one might have thought early this morning & foggy to start with, although this soon cleared & we had another glorious day. Breakfast had an enormous array of meats but the girl was reluctant to give me a third cup of tea. The landlady said the hotel was 15th or 16thC, which may explain the musty smell but at DM120, who's to complain. I drove round to Berg, another rich commuter village but found the castle inaccesible & indeed, invisible. There was a 'votive chapel' to Loopy Ludwig, just where they pulled his body out of the lake, which seemed an expensive piece of conscience money. Then, I drove down to Benediktbeuern, because this was the monastery where the Camina Burana poems were written. No sign of that but it was a vast monastery & now also used for educational purposes, although one supposes that a load of Catholic filth is shoved into minds.

Benediktbeuern Monastery

The Anastasia Chapel

We had a leisurely dinner-at-lunch in a local pub's garden & very good it was. All swine but we had different meals. I took a chance on something I did not understand & it turned out to be fresh long-stalked mushrooms. There was time to drive down to Kochelsee, the next lake & not only was it very pretty, this is where the Franz Marc Museum is. No time to visit it now, though & we went back up to Penzberg & off to Bad Tolz & Holzkirchen (the church was stone, though) to pick up the motorway to Munich Airport. Or so I thought. There was a sign at the Haar turnoff, saying carry on for the airport & we became quite worried as no further sign appeared for ages. In fact, I pulled off onto the shoulder & got blasted by truck driver's horns for my pains. Anyway, we carried on & saw a sign to Franz Josef Strauss Airport. Eh? Following this got us to a partly built airport which it turned out, had been used for several years. They had moved the airport 30km without telling me! It was also tricky to find the car hire place but, when I did, the guy said, just park it & leave the contract in the car, so I did, which saved time. There was Miles to walk in the airport, which is badly designed from that point of view but we checked in, bought some booze & got on the 'plane, where our seats were three rows apart because of getting there fairly late. A party of apparent Arnold's Wallies told Avis that the Franz Marc Museum had been specially opened for them (everything closes on Mondays over here) & that Murnau nearby was Gabrielle Munter's hangout. We did not do Munich this time but, for info on the city, try this link.