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.