The next day, we head to the Eagle's Nest, or Kehlsteinhaus, Hitler's would-be Bavarian hideaway, a few clicks down the road from Berchtesgaden. The trip goes in three stages: a very long, winding ascent in your private car, followed by an equally long, and much more unsettling, ascent in a public bus, as shown here. (No, that's not the bus we rode in, shithead. There's a whole train of them; this is taken out of one and looking at another.) The bus ride, as you can see, is pretty hairy -- ascending up a one-lane road unchanged since the 1930's, and seeming to glide in the air over the valley below. The bus delivers us at the mouth of a long tunnel which leads deep into the bedrock, dank and dripping and seemingly endless. At the end is a wide, circular lobby. There we board an elevator for a 400-vertical-foot ride straight up the middle of the Alps. (Video of elevator full of chattering Germans coming soon!) We emerge into a small foyer, from which a wide door beckons us outside. Stepping out, we find ourselves hanging in the sky on a narrow finger of rock, on which is perched a hulking stone fortress -- the Eagle's Nest, the mountain lair built for Adolf Hitler. I use the awkward phrase "mountain lair built for Adolf Hitler" because that's all it is. Far from being Hitler's favored retreat, as intended, the Eagle's Nest was carefully built by the party faithful in the late 1930's, only to be visited once by Hitler and rejected. Perhaps Hitler was afraid of heights. What a girlie-man! Hitler certainly liked the general area. He penned Mein Kampf, in a cabin on the lower slopes of the same mountain that houses the Eagle's Nest.

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