Movingon: Bavaria to the Tyrol.

My last day in Munich was a bit of of a failure, I blame my lack of research but both the old and the new art galleries were closed for one reason or another and the planned visit to the BMW experience was delayed for nearly 2 hours due to the late start of one of the underground lines so I pampered Magda and took the rest of the day off, enjoying an Italian lunch in an Asian fast food joint and finishing the day off with souvlaki in a local restaurant.
Yesterday I planned a route to Innsbruck avoiding major roads and under advice from the google maps lady the journey took me through some beautiful countryside with stunning views, I will try to attach some photos of them later. I arrived in Innsbruck by lunchtime and went straight to tourist information for all the facts, the first one I learnt was parking is at a premium and you can pay through the nose for it, having said that I dumped the car on the outskirts of town and used my newly purchased Innsbruck card which gave me free transport on local buses plus the hop-on-hop-off sightseeing bus along with free entry to most of the interesting sites. My first free tour was a walking tour of the old city with Barbara, poor girl I was the only attendee so she had to put up with my inane questions for an hour and a half, her tour was informative and she also gave me loads of advice about transport, parking, what to see and more importantly what not to see. After that I managed to drag myself to the court church which was planned as a tomb for one of the emperors but the highlight of the visit is the 28 larger than life bronze figures who line both sides of the tomb including KING ARTHUR???? What I don’t understand is that there is a local superstition that touching parts of these highly patinated bronze figures will bring you luck, fertility, or whatever but it is quite startling to see the figure representing Juliet in Munich with one golden breast where the rest of the figure is virtually black with age or one of the monarchs in the the tomb with a golden codpiece.
Today’s exploration was an example of how things can go with an organised transportation system, free parking if you use the train and buses to everywhere you could ever want to go, even with a late start I managed a prolonged visit to the Ambras Castle which from a military point of view, think of knight’s weapons and armour, was informative and 15th century children paintings were frankly disturbing. My next stop was a multi interest site but the highlight was the Bergisel ski jump (no pun intended), while I was there I watched some young German teenager jump, no snow and just some wet fake grass to land on, in my opinion a loony. The view from there is amazing and it makes you proud to know the Eddie the Eagle managed a jump of over 75 metres but more importantly his photograph is there with all the other record holders.