Dresden, October 2024

A four nights guided walking holiday with Ramble Worldwide Holidays.

Holidays

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Day 2 (Saturday 12th October)

Having arrived in Dresden the day before, today we had a guided tour of the old town in the morning, with the afternoon free for us to do and explore the city as we wished.

The Frauenkirche was destroyed, along with much of Dresden's city centre, as a result of the devasting bombing raids by the RAF and USAF on 13 February 1945.

The church was rebuilt between 1993 and 2005.


The restored interior of the church.
The elaborate decoration done to the interior of the dome.
Wow.
The Dresdner Zwinger is a palatial complex with gardens, it is one of the most important buildings of the Baroque period in Germany.

Bombed in 1945 and reconstructed in the 1950s and 1960s, the Zwinger today houses the Old Masters Picture Gallery, the Dresden Porcelain Collection and Royal Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments.
All these venues are open to the public.
The Semperoper is the Saxon State Opera house and home of the Saxon State Orchestra.
It is also home to the Semperoper Ballet.
It is located on the Theaterplatz near the Elbe River.

The opera house has had a seemingly cursed history, being destroyed twice by fire (in 1869 and 1945) and damaged by flooding in 2002.
Opposite the Semperoper is the Roman Catholic cathedral.
In the afternoon I decided to visit the Dresden Transport Museum (Verkehrsmuseum Dresden) which displays vehicles of all modes of transport, railway, shipping, road and aircraft.

Having had an MZ TS 150 motorbike in my twenties, it was nostalgic to see this 175 cc bike, produced in the same factory at Motorradwerk Zschopau.

The Augustus Bridge, built of sandstone in the early 1900s, crossing the Elbe which runs through Dresden.
Looking east, part of a major road bridge collapsed due to flooding, very recently.
You can see two of the collapsed sections either side of a pier in this photo.
Day 3 (Sunday 13th October)

Our main activity today was a visit to Moritzburg Schloss, a leisure palace used by the former kings of Brandenburg.

There was also a nice train ride on a narrow gauge heritage railway from Radebeul to Moritzburg.

I took this series of 4 photos at Moritzburg station.
The steam locomotive.
Another locomotive, painted grey, which looks to be of the same model or class as the one hauling our train.
The station at Moritzburg.
You can see the narrow gauge railway track and the low platform.

From here we walked on to the castle, through woods and around the lake, in the middle of which the castle sits.

I took a photo of the board which displays the local geography.
The Schloss is built on an island in a small lake north of the town of Moritzburg.
As we walked around the lake, the castle is seen in its full glory.
It was used as a hunting lodge and also for all the dodgy social goings-on that the royals got up to in those days.

The south-facing facade of the palace.

We did a room to room tour of the palace, using an electronic tablet showing in 3D images the people there and what happened in the rooms.

We continued to the town, where we had lunch in a local cafe.
This is where I learnt that a Wiener was a small frankfurter - I had two of them in a bread roll.
Day 4 (Monday 14th October)

The final day was to me the best day of our short stay.
We travelled by train about 17 miles southeast of Dresden to exploredsome of the natural and man-made scenery in the vicinity of the River Elbe.

Part 1 of the day's program was a visit to the spectacular sandstone cliffs of Saxon Switzerland National Park.

We had a coffee at the start, where there were viewing platforms high up, overlooking the River Elbe.

Here is a typical view of the eroded sandstone formations above the Elbe flowing from the east.
At this point we are only about 10 miles from the border with Czechia.
A view downstream, with the Elbe flowing north towards Dresden and beyond.
Looking down to the village of Rathen, which has a ferry across to the railway, which we will make use of later when we head to the fortress for Part 2.
More sandstone pinnacles in the vicinity of Basteibrücke, a man made viewing platform built between natural rock formations.
After a long but fairly easy descent, we reach the bottom of the path and make our way into the village of Rathen where we meet up with the ferry to take us across the Elbe.
Here begins the second part of the day's exploration.

We took a short train journey to Königstein, and then a 45 minute climb on foot (in parts it was steep) to a huge fortress.

It is one of the largest hilltop fortifications in Europe and is built on a hilltop plateau.

This view from Festung Königstein looks down on the nearby town with the same name.


One of the cannons housed on the ramparts.
It is possible they were never used, as nobody ever tried to capture the fortress.
The fortress relied on natural sandstone cliffs to make it impregnable.

A watch tower built outside the main walled ramparts.
A system of ramps and huge doors forms the entrance into the fortress complex.
An array of cannons lined up near the entrance to the fortress.
Outside at ground level the way the fortress incorporates stone walling between the sandstone cliff faces is clear in this shot.
Our hotel was near the old town, a good location to start journeys from, though it was more like a Travelodge than a bed & breakfast.
I just thought I'd put in a picture of a German suburban train as a reminder of all the travelling we did during the short holiday.
A statue with King August the second on his golden horse.

This was our group (14 in total) at our final dinner before Tuesday and the journey to Berlin airport and back to the UK.


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