Bad Schandau

After a quick lunch we took a brisk walk to the station to catch a train to Bad Schandau.

The info centre at the station understood English and gave us a more detailed map than we had. We took the scenic route over the bridge to snap some pictures of the town and river.

The walk through the town was very noisy along the main road. Flood damage is still very evident in most of the ground floors of all the buildings.

First stop was the Elektrischer freustehender Personenaufzug which is a freestanding electrical lift built in 1905 for transporting people up the side of the mountain. We took the return option for the lift and went up. At the top we found a very sad looking lynx cat. We then discovered that we could use the footpaths through the forest to the botanical gardens. This also meant the one way option offered for the lift made more sense suddenly. Once out the forest we could go two different routes. We decided that we should be able to turn it into a circular going up to the gardens via the one and then back down to the lift.

A bus happened by which seemed to be going in to direction we were so Jacques suggested we hop on. The rest of us were not as convinced but went along with the idea. We soon discovered that while it initially was going in the direction we wanted it soon veered off towards Schona and we just missed the stop we could have gotten off at and still resulting in a gain. The next stop was about 1.5km down the road, so we ended up walking back as the next bus was only in 2hrs.

We then did some calculations and realized that we would make it to the gardens but would have to carry on walking almost immediately if we wanted to be sure about catching the last train back to Neustadt so we took a different route back to the lift and made our way down to walk back along the bank of the Elbe river. This was a lot more enjoyable than the main road.

Along the way we found a small cafe and stopped for a drink where we were accosted by bees. They seems to quite enjoy Stean’s Diesel (Beer-Cola) and another drowned itself in Jacques banana juice. We thought about catching the ferry back, but the wait time vs. simply walking back was about the same so we walked back over the bridge again. We killed some time at the train station and found some really nice hot chocolate Leon had brought for us in the past.

After getting back to Neustadt we met up with the rest of the crowd at a local pub for dinner with the plan being an early night. It’s now 23:53…

Tomorrow is Dresden.