The first three are of Neuschwanstein (Noysh-van-stine - apply a heavy Arnold Schwarzenegger accent to sound like a local) and the last is of Linderhof (is it just me, or is my skin the same color as the castle?). Both castles belonged to King Ludwig, who, after racking up serious debt to build his fairy-tale Neuschwanstein, was committed to an institution by his family and found dead in a shallow lake several days later, accompanied by the (also deceased) physician who signed the papers. Both were known as excellent swimmers. Mysterious? I'll say. No one knows what happened, and his actual madness is debatable. B and I, always willing to play armchair psychiatrists, have some hypotheses, but no one will ever know for sure.
Walt Disney used Neuschwanstein as the basis for Sleeping Beauty's castle in Disneyland (that's the one in California, for the non-Disneyphiles among us), and he couldn't have chosen a better model. It's fitting for any royalty, even though--sadly--the majority of its rooms were never completed, as it was opened for tourism almost immediately after Ludwig passed. Cutting-edge for its day, the castle features central heating (of sorts), plumbing, and even a telephone.
We visited on a cloudy day, so my pictures look nothing like any of the postcard-perfect images that you'll find online, but I thought that the fog was fitting for the story that accompanies the castle.
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