Posts Tagged ‘Germany’

King Ludwig II was known as a bit of a nutter, but he had a lot of good things going for him, he was the guy who’s wedding celebration grew into Oktoberfest and he liked making grand and over the top castles for himself. His most famous is Neuschwanstein which is about 2 hours drive out of Munich and was the inspiration for Walt Disney’s Disneyland castles. The castle is open to the public and well worth the effort to visit. The castle is straight out of a fairy tale with gold, jewels and murals and King Ludwig’s signature swans prominent throughout the building. Poor King Ludwig didn’t get to see his finished work he and he nearly bankrupted the state, he ended up going a going over the edge and drowned with his friend in the nearby lake.

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The Sinsheim Auto & Technik Museum is the home to the F-BVFB Air France Concorde which proudly sits upon their museum roof and is open to the public. This Concorde made its maiden flight in March of 1976 and had its final flight in June of 2003. Over this time it had made 5473 landings and flown 14771 hours. The last flight was from Paris’s CDG airport to Karlsruhe-Baden Baden where it was disassembled and put on a barge for a trip up the Rhine and then trucked the rest of the journey to the Sinsheim museum. The museum also has Russia’s version of the Concorde the Tupolev TU-144 this sits beside the Air France Concorde. Sinsheim is about an hour’s drive south of Frankfurt and a little longer from Stuttgart and Munich, it opens 265 days a year.

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This 747 Jumbo jet is on display at the Technik Museum in Speyer which is about an hours drive from Stuttgart. It part of one of a few great automotive and aeronautic museums found throughout Germany. The 747 is the real thing it is a Lufthansa aircraft which has been decommissioned. You can climb the stairs and inspect the whole plane including the cargo hold which is quiet interesting. The museum has hundreds of other displays including submarines, trains, planes, cars, boats you name it- if it moves they will have one. There is also a IMax theatre, a really good cafe which serves good food and drinks including some of the regions best beer and wine and of course a gift shop which has got some great things to purchase. Read the rest of this entry »