A German & Austrian Trip in 2001 - 6
From Sachrang to Murnau & Garmisch

Sunday 16th September 2001

The Sachangerhof was DM106 for two, b & b = £35.33! Raining again, sometimes quite hard. Many types in full Tracht appeared outside & in the breakfast room, some with muskets & swords. No one spoke English but I gathered that there was a special church service. A few yards down the road, we were stopped by the procession to the chapel in the woods just above the valley bottom, which included these types & many others & still in pouring rain. This was all inches in Germany. Markus Reinhardt e-mailed me later:-

"I am an inhabitant of Sachrang and Munich and the "procession" you saw was the so called "Ölberg-Kapellen-Prozession", which is every year in September and a reminder to the wars back hundreds of years between Bavaria and Austria. Therefore, a lot of people from Austria and Bavaria wear Swords etc. and go for a prayer to the Ölberg-Kapelle (chapel of the oil mountain)."

We crossed into Austria briefly but could not find the bridge over the Inn we wanted, so used another back into Germany & made our way up a pretty mountain road to a place called Tätselwürm, where we stopped for the view, as the Sun had come out for the first time properly this trip, we felt.

Locals in Sachrang in Tracht	The view from the Tätselwurm	Schliersee War Memorial

The road carried on up to the ski area of Bayerische Zell, which we went down into. Nothing to it. We stopped in Schliersee village for coffee & a look at their lake & War Memorial, cut over the hill to Tergernsee & up to the road to Bad Tölz, bad news for me, as I got lost there Again. Between there & Mürnau, the rain variously rained or bucketed, so I could hardly see where I was going. However, it eased up before we had to get out of the car in Mürnau's well-hidden underground car park. We had thought the town a dump last Tuesday but found the middle was very well manicured indeed when we made out way to the Schlossmuseum. Fortunately, not only did they have a good permanent collection of Gabriele Munter's paintings but a special show of graphic work, mostly wood cuts. As well as being Kandinsky's squeeze, she was a major member of the Blau Reiter group in her own right. The town looks very much as it does in her paintings.

Gabriele Munter's house and...	...other views of Mürnau
Haystacks (Heuhaufen) by Gabriele Munter	Mürnau by Gabriele Munter. Compare photo above

We walked round to her charming house, where there were more paintings, the interiors set in the original interiors. A high point of the trip. I took photos of anal Murnau centre, then we drove off to Garmisch, Avis' idea & booked into the Hotel zur Post for our last two nights. We had excellent dinners (Avis lamb, me Cordon Bleu) in the Gastehaus Alpspitze in the Sonnen(!we should be so lucky)strasse, with a free schnapps thrown in, all for DM51.20 (£17.30). There is nothing charming about Garmisch, as far as we could see.