Into southern Germany

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Saturday 15th August
Into southern Germany
It has been a very good three days/four nights in Berlin see the sights and not having to drive ourselves around with the problems of city traffic and finding a car park.
The day has dawned beautifully fine and with small amount of breeze coming from the south the temperature should be warm.A problem in not understanding German is that you tend to avoid the TV channels that have the weather forecasts in detail and so you can’t be sure what the weather is actually going to be.
Another trip to the Kaufland supermarket is on the cards again before breakfast to buy fresh milk and OJ.And with a day on the road we thought we may as well indulge ourselves at the bakery outside the supermarket for some lunch.This supermarket is just so vast with so much choice that every time we have been in we have found things we haven’t seen on previous visits.
This morning we also visited the supermarket bakery for a couple of fresh Danishes and bars of chocolate that are so cheap it is not funny!!(to heck with a bit of weight gain!!)We don’t know whether it is because we are in the big city environment or not but the prices in the supermarket are the cheapest we have experienced in Europe so far.
For the first time the hotel we are staying in has a luggage carrier that we can use so that we take all our stuff out in one go,including the microwave!!So much more convinent.
We have decided to avoid the autobahn today and travel on a secondary road that runs roughly parallel towards Dresden but travels through Meissen,close to Dresden, where we want to have a stop and a look around as the description in the Lonely Planet looks like it is worth a visit.
We had to use a bit of motorway to clear the city limits and then we found the exit to route #96 which would take us south.
Driving in the countryside on the secondary roads is quite different to the motorways and the road signs are funnier too!!With the road often lined with trees close to the roadway there is usually a sign showing a car with a smashed in bonnet making contact with a tree.We certainly don’t want that to happen to RR!!
As we drove south we encountered small villages and towns every few kilometres and we are reminded that this part of Germany was run as a communist state for 40 odd years after the Second World War.
At Zossen after driving through the greater part of the small town we noticed deserted apartment blocks 3 or 4 stories high hidden behind trees that hid them partly from the road.The apartments were in a poor state of repair with many smashed windows.A leftover from the old GDR?It seems rather odd though that someone hasn’t taken responsibility to demolish the apartments which looked way beyond repair.We had read that the southern areas of Germany have been the slowest to change since the reunification in 1989.We guess it is taking a lot of money and there were of course times when we walked around Berlin city that we saw a similar situation where time had just not yet caught up with redevelopment.
The countryside is devoid of animals and given over,at least in view from the road,to cropping.Most of the hay making has been completed and in some places the fields were showing a green fuzz either from regrowth or from weeds growing where the crop had been cut down.The fields were sectioned off not by fences but by stands of trees which gave the view over the farmland a softer look as we drove along.
At the larger town of Baruth there was a reminder of the past with a Soviet tank parked at the entrance to the local cemetery.
Then we came across a sight we wished we had stopped for but for the fact that the roadway was narrow and nowhere to park.In a large field that had a green crop growing low to the ground was a machine that had long platforms out both sides and a shade cover over the top of the platform.A second look at it revealed dozens of people kneeling on the platform bent over picking the crop,which of course was gerkins!!!the staple of the German salad side of their diet!!!The sight was actually quite comical in an odd sort of way or was it that we were just in need of a good laugh in this rather serious country??!!
Further on we entered a section of the countryside where the main crop was sunflower.Unfortunately we are too late to enjoy the flower in full bloom which can be a spectacular sight when they are seen en masse as the heads had gone to seed.Just when the harvest was going to take place we were not sure but we assume what is left at the end of the season goes to make sunflower oil or perhaps the seeds are used.
One thing that does seem to have happened in this southern part of the country to improve the transport for people who don’t use the autobahn is that the secondary roads appear to have been upgraded from the reported potholed roads that used to plague East Germany.And there was a new road being constructed that we passed by the construction site of, which from a sign we deduced would be from Leipzig to Dresden.
The town of Finsterwalde was an important place for us on the map as we had to take a slight change in direction to keep on the secondary road or end up on the autobahn.The name on the map indicated it would be a town of moderate size and we weren’t prepared for the size it turned out to be.It even had a large airfield now lying disused on the outskirts of town.We guess it was probably used as an air force base in bygone days from the large number of mainly empty tall apartment blocks adjacent.The towns population obviously would rather live in single houses or smaller blocks of perhaps 4 or 6 apartments in a large house as there were a large number of unoccupied tall,5 or 6 story,apartment blocks that we passed as drove through the town.
We found our way to the other side OK including through the large market square that was relatively deserted for early afternoon on a Saturday.This place looked like it was ready to close down until Monday morning!!
At Elsterwalde,another large town belying its size on the atlas the countryside began to change more and there were hills in the near horizon taller than we had seen since entering Germany.
We decided to stop for a roadside tailgate lunch and found a spot to pull off the moderately used road onto a paved track leading off into a forest made up mainly of skinny pine trees.We stopped about 50 metres off the road and had our tailgate lunch of bread rolls with cheese and bacon encrusted on the top and Danishes we had brought this morning.We couldn’t wait any longer to tuck into the chocolate bars we had also brought this morning and all in all had a very satisfying lunch!!
There has been a noticeable absence of bird life where we have been and stopped although we did hear a bird high up in the trees for a short period while we ate lunch.Perhaps we just haven’t been in the right places yet.
The track which was wide enough for a car and made from very well laid paving stones headed off into the forest.Where it went we didn’t explore because we weren’t sure if we would find ourselves in someone’s front lawn when we emerged from the forest!!
However,as we stood at the back of the car a man on a bicycle suddenly appeared and rode by without saying a word.We were gobsmacked because we didn’t expect to see anyone and it all happen ed so fast.He rode off towards the road we had driven on and crossed the road riding off down a track that lead into the forest and vanished!!Where he came from and where he was going will be a mystery for the rest of our lives!!!
It was only a few more kilometres onto Meissen and we crossed the River Elbe to the sight of the magnificent Albrechtsburg church which sat atop a hill overlooking the river.
The town area is what we thought we would finally see when we reached this southern area of the country with traditional German architecture buildings with shops on the street level and living accommodations on the top two stories.
We wandered up through the narrow streets to the catherdral and the castle where we paid the combined enrty fee to see them both.
The catherdral dated from the late 1400’s and although quite plain in the interior was also very grand in a cathedral like style we had seen in England.
The castle also built around the same time but never actually as a castle to live in had been the main building in which the world famous Meissen china was made until the late 1800’s.Its interior was also unique with curved arches holding the 3 floors together.On the top floor where the arches all eminated from was a dome type ceiling in a star shape.
On the way back down to the town area we stopped and watched a downhill mountain bike race with jumps constructed where there were steps.We had to wait for the race to start and it wasn’t as spectacular as we had thought it might be given the sharp corners,cobblestones and hay bales on the corners to stop any cyclist falling in their race to get down the hill first.Perhaps what we had seen was a practice run or a run to get a time for a position in the real race to be held later.Either way we will never know as the locals watching couldn’t seem to understand what we were saying and we certainly couldn’t understand them.!!Anyway we had a hotel to find in Freital,what we expected would be a small town south of Dresden.
Again how wrong we were when the town turned out to be quite large although many of the again tall rather drab buildings that line the main road into the town seemed unoccupied.Or perhaps was it just that the locals had gone somewhere else on holiday as even the movie theatre wasn’t going to be showing movies again until the 20th August!!
Our hotel the Leonardo was easy to find with signs pointing the way as we drove through and arond the larger than expected town.And the size of the hotel surprised us too with over 100 rooms and the car park quite full.
Finding dinner wasn’t quite so easy and especially when I picked the wrong way to walk along the main road through the town.After discovering that nothing was open in the way we were walking we turned and went back the other way and this time found a restaurant with a beer(or should we say(bier!!)garden and sat back with a couple of tankards of a local brew and pizzas.With a gerkin salad(whatelse!!)thrown in the bill came to just€21.The small country towns are the place to eat out on the BBA!!
All in all it had been a very interesting day as we drove through old East Germany with its mix of tradional German villages,old communist style abandoned apartment blocks,disused airfields and quaint towns like Meissen.
We are off to the Czech Republic and Prague tomorrow but we shall look forward to another spell in Germany when we visit Bavaria and the Rhine Valley later on this adventure.

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