Day 6: Royal pleasures at the Königsee
Sun! Heat! Clear skies! I got up giddy with pleasure and took a moment to decide very carefully how to spend this rare summer day – who knew how the weather was gonna be like tomorrow. At the breakfast table it became clear that this marvelous day had to be spent at the Königsee, a destination I stumbled upon by randomly googling nice locations in Bavaria.
It took a little more than one hour to drive there from Dienten. We passed beautiful Berchtesgaden and parked the car in Schönau where we were greeted with a traditional zither concert at the town hall (on weekends you can park there for free, by the way). Then we walked to the Königsee, which took almost half an hour, along a purling stream of clear blue water. Since it was Saturday there were quite a few other tourists who had the same idea – I recommend you go there during the week, if possible avoiding major holidays. We passed the main tourist area, which offered the usual kitschy souvenirs, expensive beer garden-like restaurants as well as an ice cream parlor that sold iced coffee for unreasonable 7,90 Euro, and hastily climbed up the first mountain trail we could find in order to escape the high-priced madness. After walking up for a while we reached a nice lookout point (proper pictures will be provided soon) but unfortunately a fallen tree blocked the further path. Hmm. And so, while enjoying the view, I suddenly realized: we had to get on a boat! And so we did – we walked down, back to tourist-hell, and bought tickets for a ferry ride to St. Bartholomä, a peninsula on the Königsee’s west coast. And this, as I may happily conclude now, had been just the right move, because not only was the ferry-ride a sheer delight (our guide played the trumpet at the “echo wall”), also the destination itself was gorgeous.
The church of pilgrimage was a very special eye-catcher but also the exquisite mountain landscape was something I simply couldn’t get enough of. Numerous trails of various difficulty started from St. Bartholomä and I felt extremely sad that we had no time for more hiking. To top it off the weather improved even more as the day progressed and we were blessed with the most beautiful golden hour on our ferry ride back to the main station. Stay tuned for awesome pictures – I shot like mad woman because I wanted to preserve this fantastic moment so badly.
Lesson learnt today: When visiting the Königsee plan your day carefully – I will definitely return to try one of those promising mountain trails.
Things I overthought 