Wednesday 24 July. Dresden to Meissen

We left our hotel early but not quite early enough to catch the 8:09 train to Cotta so we finished up having almost a 45 minute wait on platform 3 of Dresden station before the next train turned up at 9:09.

One point to note regarding suburban  train travel around Dresden. We bought the ticket the day before but it was only valid as a ticket after we put it in a time stamp machine on the platform. After that it was valid for one hour.

It took less than ten minutes to reach Cotta, where we joined the Elberadweg going west whereas previously we had gone eastwards to Dresden.

The first picture below shows the height of the June floods which can be estimated from the debris hidden in the foliage of a river side tree.

Further along we passed a picturesque windmill on the left bank with a beer garden behind it. As it was a very hot day we stopped for refreshment. The owners had worked hard and it was difficult to imagine that all that area had been under water a few weeks earlier.

There was still a lot of  work being done along the riverbank  collecting  up debris from under trees with bulldozers.

One picture below shows a sign posted above the men's urinal in the beer garden behind the windmill. It's what might be called lavatory humour.

There were some very pleasant pastoral riverside  scenes but the day was a little too hot and sunny for pleasant walking. We tended to dash from one shade tree to the next and some were kilometers apart! We crossed by rail bridge over to the right bank of the Elbe near the halfway point for the day.

A few kilometers short of our B&B, which was itself about 30 minutes east of Meissen, we stopped in our final beer garden of the day. The northern bank had started to rise up from the river by this time and was covered in small vineyards. We reached our B&B around 3:30 after a 22 km walk.

We showered and rested and then walked down the road for a meal in the local pub. The menu said I was getting rabbit fillet but the bill said I was given hare, but who was I to split hairs.