One morning Sasha sent me through a picture from Instagram of a stone bridge high up on some rocks with hills behind and lots of autumn colours. Her message accompanying it was "What about here for Autumn colours. I know he has edited it but... It's near Dresden". I looked up this bridge (called the Bastei Bridge) and saw that yes, it was near Dresden, to the South-East of it along the Elbe River which looked like it would be a pretty area anyway. It would be accessible by train - and hey look, that train line carries on into the Czech Republic to Decin. I knew of Decin - it was where I had wanted to go by steam train when I visited Dresden during my Big Germany Trip, but the steam train had been sold out before I could get tickets. Decin itself looked rather pretty - what if we went to Dresden and stayed there, but visited this bridge and Decin as well? I'd finally be able to say that I had been to the Czech Republic, but it was also not out of the way for the Bridge. We'd both been to Dresden before on separate trips and we'd both liked it - Sasha liked the idea of going back and also the Decin add-on, and realising that the leaves were starting to drop off the trees rather quickly we aimed for the first weekend in November.
Autumn can be quite a picturesque time of year, and the autumn colours of the trees were getting quite pronounced in Berlin. The weekend following Hamburg we'd gone out and about in Berlin to have a look at the autumn colours in the parks and areas on the Sunday - it was quite spectacular looking. We'd hit upon the idea that perhaps we go to Quedlinburg for a weekend soon and experience the Autumn colours in the Harz forest region. This seemed like a nice idea on the face of it, as did the idea that perhaps we could take the Harz steam train to go and see more of these colours. But when we started getting down to the nitty gritty of working out exactly what we'd do and go about it, it started getting hard - there was nowhere in particular on the Harz line out of Quedlinburg that I could definitely think of that would have autumn colours, and I started remembering a lot of the trees in that area still retained their leaves during the winter time that I was there so maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea. We were also complicating things by wondering whether Wernigerode should be included in the visit, or whether Wernigerode would be better than Quedlinburg. It was all getting a bit hard! One morning Sasha sent me through a picture from Instagram of a stone bridge high up on some rocks with hills behind and lots of autumn colours. Her message accompanying it was "What about here for Autumn colours. I know he has edited it but... It's near Dresden". I looked up this bridge (called the Bastei Bridge) and saw that yes, it was near Dresden, to the South-East of it along the Elbe River which looked like it would be a pretty area anyway. It would be accessible by train - and hey look, that train line carries on into the Czech Republic to Decin. I knew of Decin - it was where I had wanted to go by steam train when I visited Dresden during my Big Germany Trip, but the steam train had been sold out before I could get tickets. Decin itself looked rather pretty - what if we went to Dresden and stayed there, but visited this bridge and Decin as well? I'd finally be able to say that I had been to the Czech Republic, but it was also not out of the way for the Bridge. We'd both been to Dresden before on separate trips and we'd both liked it - Sasha liked the idea of going back and also the Decin add-on, and realising that the leaves were starting to drop off the trees rather quickly we aimed for the first weekend in November. To get there, we caught a train from Berlin. This was a Czech train but it travelled through lots of Germany before getting to the Czech Republic and ultimately Prague. We didn't have allocated seats and instead started off by going to the restaurant carriage and having breakfast there because when else might we get that opportunity? The meal and coffees were quite decent, and then we found ourselves some seats in a saloon carriage where we sat for the rest of the trip to Dresden. We weren't getting off in Dresden yet, but staying on this train to Decin but I knew there was a locomotive change (from German locos to a Czech one) and that I had about 10mins to get off, take photos and hop back on - I didn't take the full 10 minutes and Sasha was half wondering if I might miss the train! It was about another hour to Decin from Dresden, down the Elbe River valley and past where the Bastei Bridge was. Decin was small, but charming. We had a decent wander around the town, as well as going up to a lookout on a tree-covered hillside with masses of leaves on the hillside. We had lunch there at a neat place Sasha looked up online, and got ourselves some Czech Pilsner to go with our hearty meals. Once we'd covered as much as we wanted to, we made our way to the station to get "Elbe-Lande" tickets which would allow us to travel by any train back to Germany and then unlimited train rides in the Dresden area. We'd been expecting them to be a fraction cheaper than buying them in Germany (the difference was you had to start using them straight away if purchased in the Czech Republic, vs anytime you validated it with the German ones) and the lady behind the ticket counter didn't speak English - but I manage to purchase the right tickets anyway and it turns out they cost half the amount of the German ones! We caught a Czech train to Bad Schandau, and discussed our options - either trying to go back to the little town we saw on the border, or going ahead to the Bastei Bridge but we couldn't do both in the remaining daylight hours. We made the call for the bridge, so caught a train to Rathen where we then caught a ferry across the Elbe and found the path up to the Bastei Bridge. It was here though that we stopped - the sign said it was a 40min walk to the Bastei Bridge up the hill, which in the by-now pouring rain and starting-to-fade light didn't sound like the most wonderful combination. So we made the call not to go up there, but consider it for tomorrow if the weather was good - so instead had some hot chocolates from a nearby cafe, then caught the ferry back and a train on to Dresden. That night, wanting good food but also somewhere fairly decently priced, we ended up going to the same Schnizz Schnitzel place that I visited last time. Remembering last time that the staff I had encountered there spoke no English, I was all ready to attempt ordering in German when the lady at the counter spoke to me in English - well there goes that! Because of the train and our early start we didn't get up to too much more that evening. The next day we both decided we didn't feel like trekking out to the Bastei Bridge again as the weather wasn't supposed to be so great again there, but was better in Dresden with no showers. So we chose to stay in Dresden and spend the day looking around the autumn colours there instead, which we did. We also had a big wander around the Old City, and visited the Zwinger Palace which is something didn't see there during my last visit but Sasha had. When it eventually got dark (which being winter, was about 4pm), we pulled out our tripods and started taking night photos of the old Dresden buildings along the Elbe Riverfront and into the city itself. Eventually we went and caught our train, which was a German one this time although it had originated in Prague and was a night train going all the way to Zurich - it was in fact the same train I had taken the last time I had left Dresden, except we were just hitching a ride on it in one of the seated carriages to Berlin. Our carriages were at the back of the train, and were Inter City branded and painted cars but the interior was the same IRE interior we'd experienced going to and from Hamburg - apparently Deutsche Bahn never bothered to bring some of the old IRE carriages up to proper IC spec and just gave them an external paint job. We got ourselves an actual compartment to ourselves (which had 3 seats on one side, 2 on the other and they were interleaved) and rode through the darkness the two hours back to Berlin. Journey over, but a lovely visit to the charming city of Dresden and the charming town of Decin in the Czech Republic. Even as we were boarding the train back to Berlin we were sure we'd be returning to Dresden soon as a part of one of our other future trips, and a visit to the Czech Republic will also be another must-do again although it will probably be Prague and not Decin.
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A Kiwi out travelling in the UK and surrounding countries Archives
August 2019
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