Eagles Nest, Cows and Cake

Today we traveled from Oberammergau to Berchtesgaden. We arrived at the hotel a bit after 11, checked in then went for lunch before going on our tour of the Eagles Nest.  We at Restaurant Waldhauser, I had a potato, dumpling and ham dish that had a fried egg mixed in. It felt like a breakfast bowl but was lunch food.  Good thing the tour departure point was close to the restaurant because fast meals really don’t exist.

The Eagles Nest in the distance

 After eating we went to the tourist office to check in for our tour. Sadly we were informed that we could not travel all the way up to the Eagles Nest since it was snowing up there and it was closed to possible avalanches.  So we had to settle for only the tour of the documentation center (history museum) and the bunkers.  The tour guide was very informative and explained that the Eagle’s Nest is actually a tea house with three rooms and was not were Hitler lived. He actually lived a little ways down the mountain in a beautiful 30 room home that was bombed at the end of the war then completely destroyed by the German Government in the 1950s.  On the mountain were the Hitler lived were also residences of his closest advisers, SS barracks and additional building belonging to the regime.  Many of those building were destroyed.  The documentation center was recently built by the German Government to inform the German people about this part of their history since much of it is never discussed in Germany. The center was actually interesting; I like the doll house for little girls modeled off Hitler’s own home.  Also women could earn bronze, silver or gold crosses depending on the number of children they had (10 kids got you the gold cross).  Then we went down into the bunker system, while the system is huge and has over 8 km of tunnels we only saw a little bit of it.  The bunker was only open to the US military till the late 1990s then was slowly opened up to public tours in the early 2000s.  Overall it was an interesting tour that lasted 3 hours. A lot of good history and interesting little factoids you don’t necessarily learn in school.  After the tour we headed back to the hotel. You can see pictures from the Eagle's Nest here.

View from our room.

At the hotel we had cake (the cake was not a lie) because they offer free cake from 3:00 to 5:00 every afternoon.  Yay for cake! There were several varieties of cake including cheese cake and pie.  We also have cows wearing bells outside our hotel room.  We have been seeing a lot of cows but really no sheep. Tomorrow we head to Lake Konigssee.