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...