A home cooked omelette was the starting point of my day.
I took my time and packed slowly to make sure everything fitted. I’ve got rid of the fork bags – well, I’ll use them for food and overflow stuff if necessary from now on, but I’m interested to see how it goes without them. I’m always refining and trying to simplify the setup.
Downtown Dresden gets going fairly late and the restaurants in my street weren’t yet open for business by the time I’d checked out. It felt a shame to be leaving this place, but other interesting places await, so I headed down to the Elbe and joined the Eurovelo 7 again.
That’s where I stayed for the day, with the Elbe on my right and villages on both sides of the river. It was nice and easy riding, with plenty of cyclists out and about. You keep seeing the same people along the path as you stop at different points throughout the day.
I stopped for second breakfast in a cafe in Meissen. The town has a great old church and a magnificent castle which towers over the place.
As I sat in the outdoor cafe, a couple of drops of rain fell. It wasn’t enough to make me think of moving inside, but it had the effect of emptying the place in about 30 seconds. Everybody scurried inside or under umbrellas as I continued to read the day’s news and check the map. Eventually, the waiter asked me to move under cover. What little rain there was, stopped almost immediately that I was undercover.
I rode around the nice town, and grabbed some lunch on the way. I had an idea of where I wanted to stop for the night but hadn’t decided just yet.
The riding became quiet with few people on the path in the middle of the day. One village had a bakerei, so I stopped, and sat outside with a terrible coffee and a palmier. I forget the German word for it but the lovely lady at the bakerei explained how it was made in detail and in German, so I didn’t pick it all up. There was a fair amount of geschnitten-ing involved from memory. Lovely people, terrible coffee. I’m glad she didn’t explain how she made it. A Dutch couple whom I’d said hello to earlier, went past with a wave as I was finishing up.
While checking the map, I found a better campsite, not too far away in Strehla and settled on it. I hadn’t noticed it on Google Maps before.
Next, was the town of Riese which was surprisingly large. The main street had plenty of shops, so I stopped at the first Apotheke to get some antihistamines. It’s hay making season (only while sun shines of course) and with everything blooming and the incessant headwind blowing everything around, the result is, you guessed it, hay fever.
In the Apotheke, there was a lady with a laundry list of requests on a full A4 page and after nearly 10 minutes, I and a few other customers gave up and went to the next place down the road.
Armed with the drugs, I took off to Strehla, found the campsite and checked in. Thirty seconds later the Dutch couple, Herman and Henrietta arrived followed by another cyclist. They’re lovely people. We talked, camped and went to the Gasthof around the corner for dinner.
It was so nice to spend the night talking rather than blogging by myself 😁. I wish them well for the rest of their journey.
The night was pretty cold, but I’m enjoying the new tent and camping more often.
