Vienna-Dresden By Bicycle. In September 2023. Day seven
Day seven (September 19, Ústí nad Labem-Dresden, 65 km)
Funny Food
The morning started culinarily challenging. When eating our breadrolls with - as we thought - butter and jam we learned slowly (first due to the taste, later thanks to the image of a pig, not a cow, on the product’s foil), that we had mistakenly bought lard instead of butter in the mini market the day before. Lard and abricot jam was a funny combination and new to me, but I don’t think that I need to repeat it.
There was no coffee machine in our appartment, which is not a good start for a day either.
550 altitude meters north of Ústí nad Labem within the first hour of the day were, however, enough to wake us up quite quickly. The view from the top reminded me somehow of an alpine mountain panorama although it’s just 750 m of altitude.
I needed a coffee on top of the hill and learned that “Restaurace” means “Napoleon” in Czech.
It’s no longer Hotel Napoleon, by the way, its current name is U Johnu - so that might be the reason for the discrepancy.
We went downhill with rather enormous speed (at least for me) and decided spontaneously to take a plane
- an old Tupolev that serves as a restaurant today, where we had another coffee (very decent, this time) and a garlic soup - which is a funny combination and a funny second breakfast. I got rid of my last CZK cash there so that, this time, the waitress got very decent tip.
The German area after the border (again, hardly visible) is called “Sächsische Schweiz” - with good reason: up and down, up and down it goes and Komoot and the landscape had again some surprises for us:
(Not in the picture are Felix and me, both with luggage for several days (including 2 laptops etc.), trying to go downhill here without losing our dignity and without yelling too much.)
Funny Objects
Then, finally, after another (lunch) break (at a place with, of course, “Solyanka” and “Würzfleisch” on the menue) and some more hills we arrived at Elbe again - flat, calm, green area with funny objects such as this one:
(What is this: a mockup airport tower? A kindergarden? An UFO? An object of art?).
or this huge TV tower (already very close to Dresden)
that had attracted up to 200.000 visitors per year until 1991 when it was closed to the public (and has been waiting for better times since then).
The “Elberadweg” was nice but (very) crowded here, with many runners, bikers, walkers etc. so that one needed to ride carefully.
More interesting objects appeared such as the “Schwebebahn”
(Steffen Müller, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16812944)
and a beautiful bridge (where we had another coffee and a cake)
I learned that the bridge is named “Blaues Wunder” by the local population.
Finally, Dresden
And then Dresden’s unique panorama appeared
We arrived in the afternoon.
Some of the tour’s statistical details:
However, the bicycles didn’t get too much time for rest as they brought us to the city center just 2 hours later.
What a beautiful city.
Tomorrow will be another rest day (I will most likely not report about). And then we will go home (by bus, looks more reliable and more convenient than train).
Felix was, again, the best companion one can imagine.
It will be a perfect memory for me.