Tag Archives: Neuschwanstein

Radius started a blog

Radius Tours, the main tour company I’ve worked with since 2005, is having its 25th anniversary this month!  It’s time to party while trying to conduct tours…

Anyways, the company has started its own blog which you can find here:  http://radiustours.wordpress.com/

Please like, share, and take a few tours if you’re in town 🙂

Oh, the weather outside is frightful…

Really, it’s not good.  Snow has been falling the last couple of days and although it hasn’t amounted to hardly anything (it’s pretty much all gone), it makes a tour guide’s life hell.  It’s just cold and wet…that’s no fun.

Wednesday I had a Neuschwanstein tour…it mostly drizzled and you couldn’t see anything.  The tour group were all happy at the end of the tour, but it really is hard to make someone actually HAPPY when you can’t show them anything.  The good part is for those moments that you CAN see the building from further than 20 feet away, there is no longer any scaffolding covering it! 

I keep having Spanish people on my tours…yet they say they have 25% unemployment.  Rather odd.

Supposedly they have a special glühbier this year at the Christmas market…gonna have to try it soon.  Tomorrow we’re going to Die Toten Hosen…it’s been years since I’ve seen them…

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Christmas time in Munich

As with every year the tour numbers have taken a nose dive for a few weeks, but now that the Christmas markets are up and running I expect my next few tours to be busy.  Along with the Christmas markets, we should have REALLY horrible weather later this week.  I’ll be down at Neuschwanstein tomorrow and it should be raining with a high of 40F.  The problem with this is that will probably be the forecast for every day until March…possibly April.  I hope I’m wrong.

I’ve gotten a few e-mails over the last few months wanting very specific/odd private tours.  I usually don’t do them if they’re hard to get to by public transportation because, well, although I have a driver’s license…I don’t have a commercial driver’s license.  Also, I really do want to feel like I’m actually doing you a service when I give a tour, not just bringing you places.  I know, most of my colleagues would just tell me to take the tour and pocket the money and who cares….well, the problem is that I do.  Glühwein sounds good about now…

Private Tours

I’ve been doing a lot of private tours lately and I really need to change the text of my private tour section here.  Basically what I need to change is to scare away the crazy people.

1.  I can’t drive you around Bavaria as I don’t have a commercial driving license (and YES, that is required).  Some guides will do this, but it is breaking the law and really not worth it if they get caught.  I live in Germany, a very rule-abiding society…and that’s just how I roll.  I do have a German driver’s license, but that is irrelevant.

2. I don’t own a helicopter or a jet, it’s impossible to do all of that in one day.  What’s that?  Google says you can?  Okay, try it yourself and tell me how that went.  I once had a crazy tour leader from Stanford University who would not listen to reason…in the end they rented like 16 BMW’s to drive to Neuschwanstein because they said it’d be faster.  In the end it was a very tight schedule with a lot of illegal driving…they barely made their tour time inside the palace and they missed their dinner reservations in Munich.  All because they believed google over their local guide who has done it hundreds of times (literally).

3.  Mainly for private tours I do Munich city tours, by foot, which can be tailored to whatever length you want or day trips by public transportation.  If not on foot, public transportation REALLY is the way to go.

I dunno…I just ran out of steam, noticed the time, and I gotta go to work.  I’m heading down to Neuschwanstein again today.  should be a high of 66 with a 30% chance of rain…HMMM…

Current price for walking tours of the city: €120 for a standard 3-hour tour.  Free if you are a member of a band I love.  (good luck with that one)