Day 12: Füssen (Eric)

Day 12: June 8th, 2019. We decided to head into the town of Füssen today. It’s a short bus ride down the hill from our hotel. 

The town itself is another charming German town with an old town complete with a pedestrian only district that was fun to explore. 

After the town center, we climbed a little uphill to Lech Falls. The Lech River runs through Füssen and is normally a beautiful bluish-green color, but we found out that because it was a warm day yesterday, the snow melt from the mountains turned the water brown. The river and the falls were still cool to see. Later in the day, when we took a boat on the Forggensee (a large man-made lake created from damming the Lech), we did get to experience the more picturesque color of the waters in this area. I’ll provide a little more information about that later. For now, some pictures of the river and the falls...

We had a nice lunch at a the Steakhaus Füssen and Tapas Bar. We tried some tasty tapas as we were not in the mood for a heavy steak for lunch as we still had more walking to do. Below is the view from our lunch spot. 

After the falls, we climbed further up the hill to the German-Austrian border where we paid 5 Euro each to walk along several treetop swinging bridges. It had fabulous views, and there is one bridge where you can straddle the border of Germany and Austria. It was a fun experience. Below the swinging bridges was a kind of miniature ropes course for children, but Jenny and I channeled our inner children and played around for a while. We were both laughing hysterically during the whole adventure. 

Our next destination was a boat ride around the aforementioned Forggensee. We took the shorter of the two trip options, and this was enough to give us some majestic views of the surrounding mountains. We could even see Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau from the boat. At one point during the trip, we were joined by a large group of wedding guests who rode across to a church on the far side of the lake (see the fourth picture below). This created a fun, but crowded, atmosphere on the boat. This incident aside, the whole trip was a relaxing way to take a break from a long day of walking. 

Of course after relaxing, we decided to walk the approximately two miles back to our hotel instead of riding the bus. We’re gluttons for punishment, but it was a nice walk with some beautiful scenery and views of our favorite castles along the way.