Everyone loves a rousing round of bar trivia—and employment at Workman, where you’re surrounded by books proffering their rich knowledge of everything from vino to babies to mouthsounds, certainly gives you an edge over the competition. And it was a Workman title that gave me that edge last week, culminating in a thrilling cash win for my team!
Composed of my roommates and our friends, our team has just begun competing in the weekly game at a bar in our neighborhood. We weren’t among the top three point-earners last week, but we still had an opportunity to win cold, hard cash if we answered the “instant gratification” question correctly. For a $100 pot, our trivia host began his query: “Sleeping Beauty’s Castle in Disneyland is partly modeled after a castle in…”
He didn’t even have to finish. I knew the rest of the question and the answer. I started bouncing up and down in my seat, whispering frantically to my friends: “I know the answer! It’s Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany!!!”
We wrote it down on the response sheet (our spelling was a shot in the dark, I’ll admit), turned it in, and broke into celebratory hoots and hollers when our host confirmed that Sleeping Beauty’s Castle was, in fact, partly modeled after the fairy-tale-like Neuschwanstein. We raked in $50 for our braininess (unfortunately, another intellectually well-endowed team turned in the correct response, too).
My friends were incredulous. “How did you know that?” they asked. How did I know that?, I wondered. Then it slowly came back to me: Hmm, I bet I read it in 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, Patricia Schultz’s behemoth, best-selling compendium of the locales and experiences that should occupy a space on every traveler’s bucket list.
So when I got home, I looked up the castle in the index (I still couldn’t fathom the spelling, though I had a Germanic hunch that it began with the letters Neu). There it was, on page 154: “Neuschwanstein was one of three castles created by [eccentric king] Ludwig [II], and by far his most ambitious and theatrical extravagance. Set on an isolated rock ledge amid heart-stopping scenery, it is the turreted prototype that inspired the castle in Sleeping Beauty and later at Disneyland.”
With last week’s trivia coup under my belt, I think the next step is obvious: It’s time to hop a plane to Bavaria and see Ludwig’s ostentatious digs for myself!
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