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Dresden Germany 26 to 27 May 2013
After travelling along the A14 we arrived at Dresden…and still raining. How annoying! Oh well, we must go with the flow. Dresden, with a population of over 500,000 people, is said to be one of Germany’s most beautiful cities.
It blossomed in the 18
th century, when it became the cultural centre and acquired many magnificent buildings. Almost all of these however, were destroyed during World War 11, when allied forces mounted vast carpet-bombing raids on the city. Today restoration work continues. We saw some buildings that still require reconstruction, even now.
It was on 13 February 1945 when 800 British aircraft launched the 1
st of 5 massive firebomb raids on the city. These destroyed the greater city and killed 35,000 people, many of whom were refugees.
After driving around the city, we set our GPS to our campsite which was just on the edge of the city. It was called Camping Mockritz. It had good facilities, with WiFi connection, lovely showers…and plenty of rain! Most of these camp sites provide fresh bread in the morning. We have been buying this for our lunch each day.
Tom spotted a right-hand
drive camper and discovered 2 Scottish girls were travelling around Germany and Czech Republic. It was good to have an easy conversation with someone who spoke English as their 1
st language. In saying this, we have always found someone who can speak English so there have been no problems. We have also observed that most of young Germans can speak English, and fluent English at that.
We have found it interesting to look at all the different mobile homes people have. Some have big satellite dishes sitting outside their rigs. We are also fascinated to see the small cars that pull some of the big caravans.
On the morning of 27 May after doing our on-line banking (thanks for your help Kerrie), we disconnected and were ready to leave at 10.00am. I have often taken the 1
st driving shift. Turning the key there was a weak attempt by the motor to turn over. I tried again. It sounded like the battery was dead. We wondered how old the battery was. We got the office to call the ADACA (RACQ equivalent). He arrived in 20 minutes only to tell us that our starter motor needed replacing. He tow-started us,
gave us an address for the Fiat repair yards and off we went. Arriving at the massive car/truck yard we found that that they could not get a new starter motor and would try to repair it. However, one of the young mechanics kept searching on the internet and found a new one. It would arrive the following morning.
No problems. We had our home with us so we asked the Iveco Truck Company if they could connect us to power – the answer was ‘no problems’ (whatever that is in Czech!!). With our GPS in hand we found the nearest shopping centre (10 mins walk) to have a look around and to kill some time. We found a wonderful little shop that served mountains of fruit, cream, ice cream, chocolate, piled high. We couldn’t bring ourselves to having one. Tom had a local beer, I had a small coffee (I love the German coffee) and later a beautiful white wine. We then went to McDonalds to hook up to their WiFi. We then went back to the mobile home (beating a shower of rain) to catch up on some blogging and travel research. Later we went back to
the shopping centre where we had dinner at a restaurant. They closed at 8.00pm so all worked well.
After a great sleep, all by ourselves with about 40 new Iveco trucks and a number of Fiat Motor homes, we got up and found that they would take a couple of hours to replace the starter motor (which had arrives). We then decided to catch the tram into the city and have a better look around. Wow, what a lovely city (about 500,000 people). The photos will tell the story.
At 12.30pm we picked our home up and we were on our way. We were off to Prague (known by the locals as Praha) and into the Czech Republic.
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