Back to collect the car which was now ready when I arrived.
After the usual procedures the women handed me the keys to our BMW 118 and a ticket to get it out of the car park. But instead of it being in the same building as the booking sheet had indicated, she directed me to the car park of the Hilton Hotel a couple of blocks away “you will find on 7th floor, danke”.
So off I headed and found the Hilton – now to find the car park.
Herr Dumb and Herr Dumber, the teenage door attendants thought I was a hotel guest and I wanted them to bring my car from valet parking. Luckily I spotted Fritz the concierge and was able to get him to understand all I wanted was directions to the carpark to get the hire car out.
He pointed me in the right direction and as I left I think Dumb & Dumber were being sent on their way to the Russian Front !
I made my way to the 7th floor and found our car. As I unlocked it I noticed the manual gear stick – we had booked an automatic. As we were already an hour past our expected departure and there would have been a 10 minute walk back to the hire car depot – and the likelihood there was no automatic available anyway (I was not taking the chances of a Trabant on the autobahn!) – I decided to stick with the manual – it has been a while but surely its just like riding a bike ?!
So in I got and negotiated my way down the ramps of the 7 floors – in 3rd gear as I later realised.
Out on the street my first turn was a wrong when it should have been a right so a quick re-think and a cut across 3 lanes had me heading in the proper direction.
I started to think sticking with the manual may have been the wrong option as everytime I stopped at lights or in the traffic, the car stalled. I then remembered I had read about the BMW “efficient dynamics” which was on a sticker on the back of the car. For efficiency / ecology or some other reason BMW has developed their new cars to turn the engine off when you come to a stop – to save fuel. Put your foot on the clutch and the
engine immediately starts again. Having worked this out I was right – now just needed to get used to the gear lever being on the wrong side and get those gear changes a bit smoother.
Finally I got back to the hotel to collect Adrienne and Liam and we were on our way. We were pretty quickly through the suburbs and onto the autobahn – but it was not quite what I expected.
At first we crawled along at about 40kph. After 10 minutes or so we found a broken down truck was the trouble. Past this we got up to about 80kph before shortly coming to a complete stop.
As we edged forward and all merged into one lane, we soon came upon the next problem – a car had plowed into the guard rail and then the back of a truck – a bit of a mess but everyone looked ok.
Past this we started to hit our straps. We were cruising along at 140 – 150kph and every now and then
a car would scream past on the outside leaving us in their dust ! When you got in the outside lane to pass you kept one eye glued to the rear view mirror just in case the next rocket came flying up behind you. At one point I thought I was going fast passing another car at 170kph in the outside lane when there was suddenly a car on my tail. I pulled back into the middle lane and this car screamed past – it was a Ford Festiva doing at least 180kph!
The german countryside so far has been totally flat. It has been predominantly farming land but
there are also wind turbines everywhere ! Thanks to the autobahn we were able to make up a little time
lost earlier. Our first stop today was to be Colditz Castle and whilst we would miss the first tour at
11:00 we were on track to get there in time for the next tour at 13:00.
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| Colditz Castle |
Colditz is your typical quaint german village with this huge castle in the middle. We wound through the streets of the town trying to follow the signs but as we got closer the signs seemed to disappear. We got to where we thought we should be, down a narrow lane, and the look on the face of 2 women who came out of a building just off the street gave me the impression we were heading somewhere we shouldn’t be. Sure enough, another 100m and the road disappeared under roadworks. So I backed up the street (nowhere to turn around) and we stopped on the corner where we thought we were close to the castle. We found a spot to park and headed off on foot but quickly realised we were heading in the wrong direction. An about face and we decided to head down another lane. This time success!
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| Adrienne & Liam admiring their escape tunnel |
The castle is huge and we headed through a couple of old gates to find the visitor centre. We paid for our tour and the lady indicated we should join it shortly outside.
We started to look at some of the items in the centre and she then came over to chat. Turns out she was the guide and we were the whole tour group so off we headed on our private tour.
The tour was excellent and turns out tomorrow, 12th April, is the 70th anniversary of the 1st successful escape from Colditz – a Frenchman. We saw some of the old cells and part of a tunnel that was dug over a 9 month period only to be discovered as they got toward the end.
After the tour we headed back to the car and another task not performed for a while – a hill start in a manual car.
There was slight panic from the other members of the party as the car lurched forward toward the car in front, but as I then successfully engaged reverse we were heading in the right direction and we were able to leave Colditz without further incident – probably lucky we weren’t here in WWII !
We stopped just out of town for a late picnic lunch then headed off through the countryside toward Dresden. We reconnected with the autobahn and arrived in Dresden about 16:00. We dropped our luggage at the hotel and headed off to the sights of the old city – the Zwinger and Frauenkirche.
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| The Zwinger quadrangle |
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| Frauenkirche church |
The Zwinger had the mandatory section surrounded by scaffolding but is a grand rectangular building with an enormous open quadrangle in the middle.
The Frauenkirche church was almost flattened during WWII – we found a postcard showing how it looked in 1945 and there were literally only 4 pillars left standing. It was left in that state by the East Germans and it only started to be rebuilt in 1992. It has been restored amazingly. We then headed down to the River Elbe before heading back to our hotel for dinner. The Ibis hotel we are in is one of 3 identical buildings – all Ibis hotels – which were originally East German accommodation blocks.
So Comrades ! Until tomorrow ………