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8
May, 2000 - We packed the van the night before, so all we had to do was
gather last minute things, and then we were on our way. First stop, Gas Station,
can't get too far without fuel for the van.
 We visited the Triberg area on our way down to Italy. We
were
looking for cuckoo clocks for some of the family as souvenirs. The first place
we stopped at was called The House of Black Forest Clocks. Here is a picture
of me in front of the largest working cuckoo clock. It has 21 working figurines on and around the clock, We did happen to be
there when the clock struck the hour. We got there just after a couple
of tour buses full of people arrived. The place was so full of people it was
hard to get around and look at the clocks.
 After leaving that
store we went on down the road to the House
of 1,000 Clocks. Here we found the biggest hand carved cuckoo
clock. There aren't any moving figures on this clock (not even the
cuckoo bird moves), but you can push a button on the clock to hear the
call of the cuckoo. This is where we ended up buying our
clocks. If you would like to see what they have, just visit their
web site by clicking on their name above.
The route we chose
to get to Italy took us into France, back into Germany, and then Switzerland,
before finally going into Italy. I think I know why Swiss cheese is
called Swiss cheese. Because Switzerland has so many tunnels it is
as full of holes as the cheese is.
We got to Camp
Darby, Italy around midnight. The campground office was already
closed so we just chose a site and put up our tent.
9 May, 2000 - When we checked-in we found that we had to move
our tent. After moving our tent we ran a few errands before
heading to Pisa. Before we could go too far we needed gas. Did
you know that Italian gas stations are closed between 12:00 and 3:00
pm? Neither did we! After trying several different places, we
sat for two hours waiting for one to open.
 In
Pisa we found our way to the main plaza area. It is an area that
sits within an old city wall. Along with many many shops, there are
three prominent buildings in the plaza. The first is a big building with a
dome on top of it. I don't know the name of it. We were too
busy looking for souvenirs to investigate it.
The
second building is a very large church. There are signs outside the
church indicating that there is a dress code. They do not allow
shorts, tank tops, etc... You have to be wearing nice clothes to go
inside. We did notice, that even back when the church was built,
they believed in recycling. A large number of the stone the church
is built out of, have letters, numbers and other carvings in them. I
know that these stones were not originally for this building, because the
carving are at all different angles. Some are upside down, others
are vertical.
 Just
past the first two buildings is the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The tower has a
fence running around it, to keep people from getting too close. There is
construction work going on right now. They are attempting to keep
the tower from toppling over. If you would like to know more about
the Leaning Tower of Pisa, you can read the information
that I found on a sign posted on the fence around the tower.
10 May, 2000 - We got up early and headed for Rome. We headed
South along the coast. Since it wasn't an Autostrada (Freeway), we
ended up winding through lots of hills and several tunnels. Three
hours later, we made it to Rome, and spent the next hour or so fighting
traffic and trying to find a parking spot near where we wanted to
be. We finally got fed up and decided to find a train station and
ride the train back in to the Coliseum. We had a tour book that we
had planned on trying to follow.  But
half the places that the tour took us through, we would have had to pay to
go into them. As much as we would have liked to, we were
afraid that we wouldn't have enough Lire (Italian money) to go into the
places and still be able to pay the tolls on the way home. We only
had 150,00 Lire left to spend. We did walk around the area and
looked at what we could get to.
11 May, 2000 - We decided that it would probably be best if we
started on our way back towards home. We chose a route that would
take us through Florence and then to Garmish-Partenkirchen, Germany.
We wanted to go to the Galeria de Acadimia. This is the museum where
the statue of David is. We made it Florence without any
problems. Finding the museum on the other hand, was another
story. We didn't have a very good map of Florence, and ended up
driving all around town for at least an hour or two. We finally gave
up and decided to continue on. By then, even if we had found the
museum, it would have been closed.
There is an Armed
Forces Recreation Center (AFRC) in Garmish. We had spent the night
at the campground there once before, and thought that we could easily find
it again. Well, after driving around town for close to an hour, we
finally ran into an MP (Military Police). She said we looked lost,
and after hearing where we were going said that she would lead us
there. By the time we got the tent set up up and everyone to sleep,
it was 4 in the morning.
12 May, 2000
- When we set the tent up, Donna had made a comment about not putting the rain fly
on. It is a good thing that we went ahead and did.  We
got up around 8:00, dried the sleeping bags and paid for the usage of the
campsite. We drove to the village of Schwangau and parked the
van. There are two castles there, and we decided that we wanted to
visit both of them. So we slowly made our way up the street lined
with souvenir shops, to the Ticket office. We bought our tour
tickets for the castles. The tickets had a specific time with a tour
number on them, indicating what time you had to be at the castle in order
to go inside. It started raining before we got started up
to Hohenschwangau and continued to rain the rest of the day.  After
we finished our tour of Hohenschwangau we rode most of the way up to Neuschwanstein Castle
in a 'cattle' truck. The rest of the way is done on foot.
There is a side path over to a bridge. From the bridge there is a
nice panorama view of Neuschwanstein.
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