Advertisement
Published: August 15th 2011
Edit Blog Post
Having rested up in Leipzig it was time to continue our journey across Germany. Tonight we intend to have a one night stopover in Kassel. Knowing we had all day to reach our destination we decided to meander through German country side and see some real Germany other than what you see, or rather don’t see, from a motorway.
Driving along a minor highway we noticed the turnoff to Colditz. From our memories this place name has a connection with WWII stories seen on film, TV and in novels. The main attraction of the town is its castle. It stands dominant over the town and appears to be undergoing renovation. The castle’s fame was as a POW prison for persistent escapees, several of whom were New Zealanders.
This little detour was not on our sightseeing list but was well worthwhile. After our visit to Colditz we felt the need for a facility stop so seeing a reasonable sized shopping centre we called in. On entering the building we realised we were in the supermarket. As we dithered in the entrance, not sure whether to come or go, alarms started ringing and a loud voice called out “Achtung, Achtung!” The rest of
the sentence we did not understand but we think it said, “The prisoners are escaping!” A woman near us laughed and said something in German that we think meant, “It’s the weather you know, it causes strange things to happen”.
From our alarming experience we continued through rolling countryside where farmers were busy harvesting their wheat crop between unseasonal showers, or preparing land for sowing crops that will germinate in the Spring. It must be depressing for the locals who lived through a very harsh winter and were so looking forward to a great summer. What they seem to have got is day after day of rain. The down side of all the harvesting is that the crop needs to be taken to storage. To do this tractors tow one or two trailers of grain along narrow twisting country roads causing incredible queues of traffic. If it is not a tractor then it is likely to be a very large combine harvester.
Having followed all sorts of farm machinery and driven through many small country towns we decided that it was time to head for the motorway and cover the final 100 kilometres in reasonably quick time. Sometime in
the future it would be interesting to explore this area that was once part of the border between East and West Germany. It appears there is a natural green belt from the Baltic to Bavaria as a result of the old border area.
Now that we have Miss GPS on board it was effortless finding our way through a maze of motorways until the final destination when we arrived in the middle of a distribution centre carpark. With some human intervention we soon found our hotel and expect to have a good night’s sleep thanks to a combination of a comfortable bed and a great new set of earplugs.
Tomorrow we tackle the spaghetti maze of motorways around Kӧln.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.073s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 14; qc: 29; dbt: 0.047s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb