Driving the German Alpine Road But Not Seeing Much

After our three days in the Berchtesgaden Alps, the weather gave us a serious nudge to get going. As the clouds rolled in, we decided to skip the panoramic Roßfeldstrasse drive and got on our way to meander along the scenic Deutsche Alpenstrasse (German Alpine Road) for the next 2-3 days.

READ MORE: Road Tripping around Southern Germany

The German Alpine Road is one of many scenic themed roads across Germany, and takes you along the outskirts of the German Alps. It’s slow travel on country roads with tiny hamlets, pretty little villages and old-fashioned towns every couple of kilometres. Literally.

For the first day, we persevered but as more and more fog moved into sight and more and more mountains moved out of sight, we ended up abandoning our plans and cut this part of our road trip short.

In hindsight, this was a fabulous decision since it gave us more time along the Moselle and Rhine Rivers later on in our trip.

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A PHOTO SUMMARY OF THE GERMAN ALPINE ROAD

So, here’s a photo summary of our foggy drive…

RAMSAU

Our first stop was a whole 15 km away: the tiny village of Ramsau. I can’t even remember why we went there, maybe we just took the wrong turn but in any case we came upon a view that I had seen before. Just not here. I nearly did a back flip (except that my gymnastic days are long gone, and I was never that good with flips…).

Crazy, huh?!

Ramsau is a pretty little village and I can wholeheartedly recommend the local bakery. Well, not from firsthand experience obviously but the husband bought some amazing local sourdough bread (oh so cheap…) and a ginormous piece of strawberry rhubarb tart, for a €1 or thereabouts.

I got kind of obsessed with these round church spires found all over Bavaria…

NEUBEUERN

And equally obsessed with painted houses…

Basically the whole town of Neubeuern had painted houses. On a side note, we bought ridiculously expensive aspirin here, and by ridiculous I mean €6.50 for 20 tablets (= $9.50); mental note to self ‘take more aspirin when travelling to Germany’.Save

BAD TÖLZ

And more painted houses in the town of Bad Tölz…

MITTENWALD

The next day we had a look around picturesque Mittenwald and saw yet more painted houses. I loved the old-style gutters and would have liked to actually see the mighty Karwendel Mountains in the background but no such luck…

And then there were these lovely artifacts of medieval signage everywhere… Including my favourite ever.

TATZELWURM

We didn’t just stop in towns but when we saw a sign for waterfalls near Oberaudorf, we decided to take a break and go for a quick walk to the Wasserfälle am Tatzelwurm (Tatzelwurm Waterfalls).

I expected to see a piddly little stream of water but no, we encountered a roaring and gushing waterfall, dropping 95m amidst lush greenery!

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SUMMING UP

On a clear, blue sky day taking the Alpine Road should be a panoramic drive but given the weather we experienced, I can’t really say and had to pop it onto our Flop 5 list. Still, I enjoyed pointing out all the imaginary mountain peaks marked on my map to the husband. 🙂

We had planned to go up Germany’s highest peak, the Zugspitze, but decided to give that a miss since it’s really not worth paying €55 (per person! [$80]) to have a view of… well, nothing.

So it was at this point that we abandoned our plans for the German Alpine Road and took a shortcut through Austria to the town of Schwangau where our next adventure, Neuschwanstein, awaited us.

I’ll leave you with a picture of our least favourite campground at Kochelsee where we stayed on Day 5 of our road trip. I think it’s obvious why I didn’t like it.