Fog lifts off the valley as your private car slips out of Munich and into a landscape of folded fields and timbered villages. The road climbs toward the Alps; farmhouse roofs and church steeples pass by while the air tightens and the peaks draw nearer. At Neuschwanstein, the castle’s pale towers loom above spruce and limestone ridges — a constructed fantasy set against real alpine geology. Linderhof, smaller and more intimate, sits among formal gardens, waterfalls, and a grotto that echoes a baroque taste for theatrical nature.