The main town between Oberammergau and Garmisch-Partenkirchen is Ettal. Ettal is the site of the famous monastery. It's famous for beer, for cheese, and yes, for a basilica dating from 1330. The monastery is quite on the ball still, with monks in residence, and students. It also owns a large hotel across the street, a book store, and a souvenir store. Down the road is the farm where the cows live and where the cheese is made.
We started out in the basilica, which was built around a madonna and child figure that Kaiser Louis IV brought back as a souvenir from Italy. He was actually out of favour with the pope, and started the monastery with the madonna, for imperial and territorial reasons.
The interior of the basilica looks like the customary south German baroque extravaganza. It has cherubs, lots of gold, and large ceiling paintings, with hundreds of figures. We actually forgot to look for the famous madonna while inside. It is said to be very small, in comparison to all this other stuff.
Everything in the bookstore was in German, but we looked at it all anyway.We love books so much that we seem to even love ones we can not read. There were childrens books there as well, but though we tried, we could not read them either. We need to go to school, sooo bad!
The lady in the souvenir shop was so kurt when we asked how to reach the cheese factory, that what she said was of no use at all. so we fired up good old Rick Steves on Kindle and got perfect directions. The cheese factory, as I guess could be predicted, did not feature old monks in tattered robes stirring vats of milk with old oak oars. Rather it was an all gleaming stainless steel affair, computerized, and seemingly all run by one guy with a touch screen. This does not mean that the cheese has to be not good, though. There are still in the background the swiss cows in the flower filled meadows, the no doubt highly guarded cheese cultures, and the mountain air.
The cheese factory also had a terrace overlooking meadows and over to mountains, and here we got some mohn and quark cheese cake and an apple cake. Frankly, we had to work to stuff these into our pudgy little faces. Now, with the southern tier long behind us, with a month of passing a dozen bakeries a day, and with the much warmer weather now here, we are not nearly as hungry all the time as we were. We will still try to keep up on trying every pastry in the country, but it's getting harder!
Rooflines of the Ettal monastery. Very evocative, with the mountains behind.
South of Ettal was an unexpected challenge. The road headed down a curvy, perhaps 10% track, for 3 km. There was no space provided on this for bicycles and traffic was heavy. Our only choice was to grit our teeth and go down. It could have been worse - had we been coming the other way -up- we would have been pushing the bikes, with no sight lines for the drivers. This sure shot our claim that there is always a way for the bikes in Germany.
At the bottom the views opened up to an entirely new range of mountains. These were taller than the ones we had been seeing, and with a lot of snow on them. In fact, it was the range that includes the Zugspitz - Germany's tallest. At first it was not clear which of the peaks it was, but then Dodie spotted the cable going up the side.
