A rock and a Fortress

The final day of our weekend away we spent exploring the Festung Koenigstein (Koenigstein Fortress).

It's a very impressive fortress, construction of which started towards the end of the 16th century. It is built on a series (or a very big one) of sandstone outcrops. walls were built along the lower section and the top seemed to have been levelled off for building. It was used to govern the surrounding countryside for well over 300 years and included kommandants apartments, church, army barracks, stables, palace etc.

From the car park we took a little train...

...up to the fortress, then took a panoramic elevator to the top, with, of course, a panoramic view from the top....

The Fortress entry, complete with drawbridge....

....and the fortress church...

A closer look at the entrance but...

...we didn't want too close a look at the dungeon!

After exploring the site, we stopped at the bakery on top and had coffee and some very nice cake. We had trouble ordering it as we were served through a small window and all the food was almost out of site. Anyway we got what we wanted and it was yummy, so yummy we ate it before we had a chance to take a picture of it.

Once we left there, I put my foot down and got back to our base here in about 2 1/4 hours, in time to see most of the men's singles final from Wimbledon.

Following our walk warm up on Friday afternoon we rose at a reasonable time on Saturday and enjoyed a typical German breakfast. It consisted of lots of cheeses, sliced meats, tomato, cucumber and raw onion. The pension hotel we stayed at boasts of using locally grown organic foods as much as possible. Whilst we're not particularly into organic food, the food was good and tasty. Some of the meat seemed to be served raw but even that was good.

We had been advised by someone to park in a certain car park but it was so close to the pension we started our day off walking from the pension.

We quickly got onto the 'green circle' trail and got into our pace.

The walk was largely reasonably flat (that is, not too steep!) but some stretches were pretty steep. At least it was largely a laid, loose gravel path path with steps laid in the steeper places.

The weather was again not hot but we managed to work up some perspiration in a few places with all the exercise.
The trail wound it's way through the Elbe forest with steep cliffs alongside the path in places, among the trees with occasional views across the vistas. Unfortunately, we thought that not much of the scenery would do the place justice. It's hard to take a good picture through the thousands of trees we passed or of views looking well into the distance. On top of that the camera also suffered double battery failure! I had charged the batteries before setting off for the weekend and even charged a spare set. When the batteries gave out, I loaded the spare set only to find that they were also dead. I guess rechargeables are only so rechargeable.

After a little over three hours we made it up to "Gross Winterberg", a well known hotel and restaurant. It has clearly seen better days although there was quite a bit of scaffolding around and some extensive renovation work is underway. I went for the schnitzel, butter peas and boiled washed down with a pint (or was it a litre?) of a dark local brew. Maybe it was the air or the exercise but it all went down very nicely thanks. We did sit on the deck and have lunch although it was quite windy at times with some dark clouds but the rain held off for the whole day.

After lunch break it was time to head down a different route to the hamlet of Schmilka. It might have been better if we had taken the route I intended but map reading after that dark beer may have influenced my decision and we took a different route to that intended, though thankfully for me, at least it was a trail leading to Schmilka!

It was only about 45 minutes easy walking down to the hamlet where I bought some new batteries and started clicking again.

The houses along the stream feeding into the river Elbe were tightly packed onto the hillside and very nice looking and generally tidy.

On the river bank was a boat that was obviously a ferry and since we planned to get a ferry downriver back to Bad Schandau we tried to board it. When we told the boat pilot in basic English that we wanted to go to Bad Schandau he babbled away in German despite our blank expressions. Eventually he scribbled on a piece of paper 15:45, gesturing that we should return at 3.45pm (in about an hour). We explored a little, took a few more pictures and hung around the river bank passing time. Meanwhile the ferry had left, and come back again, several times. The little boat was just a ferry taking people across the river rather than up or down it. At about 20 minutes to 4 o'clock the ferryman shouted at us as we sat on a bench "Bad Scahndau, Bad Schandau" and started waving his arms at us, sat about 30 yards away.

We thought that maybe now he would head off downriver so we boarded the boat again but just stood there not knowing what to do as he didn't want any money.

Suddenly, around the bend steamed another, larger boat that tied up alongside us and the ferryman made sure we stepped onto that boat for our destination and paid our eight Euros. At last we were headed back to Bad Schandau. Wrong!

The 'wrong' side of the Czech border!

The boat pulled away but instead of going upriver we headed downriver into the Czech Republic, the border of which was only about 200 yards away. We rode into the Czech republic half a mile or so and pulled up to a jetty where we took on more passengers and then thankfully pulled out and started heading back to Germany! our next stop was....where we started our boat trip from. We took on a few more passengers and continued the journey down river, arriving at Bad Schandau in about 30 minutes.

A river view on the way to Bad Schandau

A quick explore of the little town, some pizza and a nice cup of tea, in a cup complete with it's own lid and we were refreshed.

A short walk away we boarded the passenger lift to take us up 50 metres up the cliff from where we had to climb another 50 metres up and a half mile or so along to get back to the pension where we collapsed after all that adventure.

...and a view from the top of the lift

A house near where we stayed...

Having not had a break from work or the apartment since our trip to Brugges, it seemed like we were due another little break! This weekend we headed off to the area known as Swiss Saxony although it is still in Germany and actually only about 150 miles south of Berlin. We travelled down on Friday afternoon and stopped just short of where we were booked in, to visit Bastei. This is an area of rocky outcrops
and Bastei in particular is where a lot of The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe' was filmed. Swiss Saxony is a large national park.

After the drive down we took a ferry across the river then had a hard half hour climb up (and we mean up!) to the main tourist attraction. We decided to visit this area on Friday afternoon since we were told that this place can get very crowded on weekends. The weather was OK, good walking weather.

There is no shortage of spectacular views from the top although trying to do them justice with a few pictures is not easy. Having climbed all the way up we took pictures of where we came up from! The river is the River Elbe that flows from the Czech Republic, not many kilometres to the east.

Bastei seems to be the name of the man made bridge across several adjacent sandstone outcrops.





Here is Den on the bridge.



Out of interest, we discovered that the Brandenburg Gate, here in Berlin, is cut from sandstone from this region.

On Saturday 23th June we headed into Berlin to do a little more exploring. We did lots of train travel but it seemed that whenever we were underground riding the train it would rain but whenever we popped up to street level the rain would stop, at least most of the time, there was once we stayed on the U Bahn platform because we could see the rain still pouring down.

The only place that I took a picture was at the Neue Synagogue , which was looked pretty good from the street. However most of it was destroyed in the war, some of it in the 'Crystal Night' (when all the glass was broken) and then by the Allied forces by bombing raids. By the end of the war all that was left was a heap of ruins. Eventually the decision was made to rebuild it although by then there were other synagogues around so the rebuilding did not include everything that had been there previously but basically was just the frontage that was rebuilt. That included the dome as you can see and a few meeting rooms, now used for exhibitions on Jewish life and culture in Berlin, pre- and post-war.

Rather than keep dodging the rain we headed back to base...to explore more another day.

Today, 1st July (Oh Canada), we went to Peacock Island, over to the west of us. We got there by ferry and spent time looking at the schloss (castle) and various other buildings dotted around . It was interesting that many of the buildings were built intentionally to look like ruins! I'm not sure about this little building though, it looks mostly like a roof on the grass! I wonder if it was an 'ice house', used to store ice for drinks. The ice may have been cut from the Wansee lake and could have been stored here for well into the summer. That is only speculation but there was a similar structure in Williamsburg built for that purpose.

From the island we naturally got a good view of the surrounding lake, quite a busy little boaters playground.

If you have seen the news lately, there has been renewed speculation about Nessie, the Loch Ness monster. We didn't see Nessie but we did see Moby Dick.

Having gone this far I should also show that, yes, we did see a few peacocks as well.