The Eagle's Nest

(first of two blog entries today)

We were sad to leave or place under the castles. Five nights isn’t a long time, but it is enough to establish a sense of “home” on vacation, especially when you eat breakfast and dinner there every night. But we had to go, and we had to go in a hurry. We had a three-hour drive ahead of us, and things to see after that drive.

Our first stop was the Berchtesgaden area (just outside of Salzburg) and lake Königsee. The lake is in a valley surrounded on all sides by dramatic mountains. Each spring the snow melts and the water goes into the lake. In places, it is hundreds of feet deep and icy cold all year-round. Being surrounded by very steep mountainside gives it a feel similar to Norwegian fjords. In just a few places, there is enough flat land to support habitation. One of these is at the mid-point of the finger-shaped lake and is the home to the church of St. Bartholomew and a few other buildings. We took a tourist boat out to the area and had a picnic lunch and walked around a bit. It’s a very pretty area, but also a bit tacky by the presence of too many tourists like us.

After we took the boat back, we drove just a bit up the road to the village of Obersalzburg, and the entrance to Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest” complex on the top of the nearest mountain peak. It was built in 1938 for Hitler’s 50^th birthday. To get to the parking area we had to drive up a long twisty road so steep that our manual transmission car had to stay in 1^st gear most of the way. By the time we got to the top, parked and got out of the car, we noticed it didn’t smell too good…

Then we had to board a tourist bus (for a not-so-small fee) and I wondered why they couldn’t just let cars drive up. I soon found out why. The road the bus traveled made ours look easy by comparison. One lane wide, steep, sheer cliffs and hairpin turns for another 20 minutes – up, up, up, up and up some more. It really was quite an engineering feat. Finally, there was a space wide enough for the bus to turn around and let us off. That was the entrance to “the cave”. Giant steel doors opened to let us in to the dark, wet, long, and very cold cave. After about 200 feet you enter a small round room with a gold elevator door. The elevator whisked us up to the Eagle’s Nest building (mostly a reconstruction of the original destroyed by allied forces, post-WWII) and to an absolutely stunning view. I have seen taller mountain peaks in Colorado and Canada, but this 360-degree panorama was unique. It was certainly fitting for a man of Hitler’s ego.

Unfortunately, the current building is little more than a restaurant with a great view. The only object original is the fireplace area, where you can still see where chips had been broken off the marble by GI’s looking for a souvenir. But it is enough to get a sense of what it was like to have a hide-away so unique, stunning and secure.

Then we drove into Salzburg, found our B&B and a place to eat some pizza and pasta. Tomorrow was supposed to be stormy. I hope not, since it’s our only full day in Salzburg and we are hoping to go on a bike tour…