Dresden, Germany

I have missed writing about some of the prep for this journey, but I wanted to use this venue to document our trip. I will include a How To section at the end of most posts to help you with yoiur planning.

We had a short night Saturday, only a few hours sleep before leaving early Sunday morning to get to Charlotte, NC for the overseas flight. We both had trouble getting everything we need for these 3 weeks into our backpacks. Fred was still finishing up work and community tasks and I was saving and printing maps, guidebooks, and genealogy "stuff" until the last minute. We left home about 10:00 pm and slept at the Comfort Inn, Platte City from 2 until 5 am, not enough sleep and not recommended. We did the Park and fly from that hotel, which will actually save us on parking.
The 3 flights went well: KC to Charlotte NC, Charlotte to Frankfort (overnight), Frankfort to Dresden. There is a seven hour time difference between Frankfort and Kansas, so the "overnight" flight actually started about 5:00 pm ET and ended at 6:00 am Frankfort time, but it was about 8 hours long. We ate dinner on the plane, then slept some.

We arrived at the Dresden airport about 11:00 am on Monday and got good info from an english speaker at the airport information desk. We bought all day transportation passes there, then took the train downtown to our hotel. I had found and reserved a small hotel called Fischhaus Alberthafen on the internet, a guest house and seafood restaurant located on a working river harbor. We checked in, then ate good seafood lunch there.

I planned two nights here, for two reasons: To allow time to get rested from the travel and time change and to ensure we could get on schedule if there were any travel delays. I think the strategy worked well. We were exhausted on Monday, so ate a good lunch, took a walk, then had a late afternoon snack, got to bed early and woke up early Tuesday feeling good.

Our walk gave us a feel for the city and kept us upright on our first day in this time zone. The temptation is always to take a nap that first day, but we get acclimated better when we stay awake until early evening the first day. There was a minor mishap. I took out my trusty old camera and the lens cover was not opening properly - this has happened before and the result is photos with black diagonal bars across them. So, then we had a goal, find a camera store and purchase a new camera. We stopped at a shop selling local wood carvings and crafts and asked. A young man working there directed us across the street to a shopping mall. Behind an old facade was a huge new mall with stores of all kinds. We bought water at an Aldi, then got directions to a photo shop were we got a camera.

After a snack, we walked to the river Elbe that runs through Dresden, then along the river back to our hotel. The river is an important part of the city environment, there are paddle wheel steamers, restaurant boats, and cafes that overlook the river. On the way home, we also walked past the Saxon state government buildings, which are modern and impressive architecture. The old part of Dresden was almost totally destroyed in February of 1945, in one night 75% of the old city was bombed and burned. The old architectural treasures, the opera, the Zwinger museum and art gallery, the royal palace, the cathedral and the Frauenkirche were all destroyed and have been carefully rebuilt of old stone. These now stand beside post WWII soviet buildings and new, modern shopping malls.

Enough for today, time to get breakfast and get started on this day here in Dresden!

How to: To find the hotel in Dresden I googled Pension, Gasthaus, and hotel Dresden (Pension and Gasthaus are German equivalents of small hotels). I also googled the same for Saxony, the German state we are visiting. These are some of the links I used: http://www.saechsisches-burgenland.de/ , http://www.leipziger-land.city-map.de/ , http://www.bedandbreakfast.de/ , http://www.fischhaus-alberthafen.de/