This past summer when Holly and I went to Poland, we decided to stay a little longer after the group left to bum around some other parts of Europe we’d always wanted to see.  Germany was really high on our list; specifically Bavaria.  A friend of ours recommended we go check out the Neuschwanstein Castle near Füssen, so that’s what we did!  Like so many other places we visited in Europe, the castle was actually under-going renovations on its exterior… so there was an unfortunate amount of scaffolding surrounding much of structure; not so great for pictures.  The very face of the castle had no scaffolding on it so we set out to try and find a good spot to take pictures from that angle… that led to a cable car ride up into the mountains, which led to us walking out a trail, which led to this view.  No castle… but man was it spectacular!  I later realized that the Austrian border was just behind us there.  Pretty neat stuff!  As it turns out, the best place to take a picture of the castle from up there was down a long, and totally different trail OR you could just hang out the window of the cable car… which is what I ended up doing. :)  At any rate, we got to experience the beauty of the Alps, whether there was a castle in the picture or not!

–Dan Thompson