Journey to Saxony

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July 14, 2010. Pirna, Saxony, Germany


8:52 p.m.

You can hear it coming, a distant whine. You hear it for a long time—minutes—before it volumes up. Then it hits, the roar, as the train shudders by, not ten meters from your deck chair.

Once it has past, you don’t notice its sound as it continues up the track to Dresden. You hear, instead, the voices of the bargemen over the diesel rumble of their craft. This seems to be a station, a way-stop where the barges and their tugs rest a while, for what is unclear.

A sparrow chatters from the top branch of a blue spruce as if this were a peaceful place. The brochure suggested only sparrows, and a river to row.


9:07 p.m.

You barely hear this one before it is upon you; it came from behind your cabin roof, suddenly, bound for Prague. The sparrow never stops.


9:12 p.m.

The third train. You decide to move indoors, and close all the windows, as the mosquitos arrive. That sparrow should audition for the part of court nightingale. Such tenacity! Such spirit!



So.

Today has been the kind of day I travel for. You just can’t plan for the twists this day has taken; of days like this, memories are made.

We have been planning for months to visit this area with Ezra. He and Katharina had come here hiking in the Bastei in the winter, and the landscape in their photos was astounding, so we thought we might all take a sidetrip here together. (Unfortunately Katharina has to work all week—she’s an intern in pediatrics at a Brandenberg hospital, putting in the legendary hours expected of young doctors.)

(9:20 p.m. train)

Anyhow, by the time we made reservations, it was hard to find vacancies in this area (www.saechsische-schweiz.de ), since it is a favourite holiday spot for Germans, apparently. Ezra and Katharina found this sweet-looking guest cabin online, and the price was right, so we took it.

We left Berlin around noon, after a relaxing breakfast in the BilderBucke. We were armed with a GPS (who yelled at us in German until Ezzie figured out how to shut her up), a Michelin map book, and driving directions I had copied from Google maps. We had suspenders and a belt, all the way.

(9:26 train)

Most of the 2-hour drive was uneventful. The GPS and my Google directions lined up perfectly until, three kilometers from our destination, the road was closed due to construction. “Oh,” Ezra said, “This is what she meant, that we wouldn’t be able to get there this way.” We had vague instructions to go out through the next village and then circle around from the east. We tried that, but the side road in the right direction was little more than a wagon track. We asked directions and were told that, yes, that little road was the right way, so we took it, through a forest then down again to the river. We came to the end of the road in the yard of an old farmhouse. It looked like a rougher version of those farm couryards they like to put in movies, with huge Italian families dining al fresco. It was gorgeous. The old man working there didn’t even look surprised to see us and was about to go inside when we asked him where we might find #17 (his place was #5 on the road we were looking for). He gestured and explained (Ezra, thankfully, has been living in Berlin and studying German for a year, or God knows where we might have ended up) where we needed to go. There it was, #17. No sign that it might be any kind of rental accommodation, but we parked and walked up a long flight of stone steps. At the top, in a garden which, again, one only sees in movies, a woman was sunbathing. She did look rather surprised to see us, but listened as Ezra explained, and told us the most likely way to go to find our way to our little piece of heaven on the river. By this time, I was thinking we should just offer them the €60 a night to stay there.

Anyhow, we found the river road, and we found our cabin. We found out about trains and mosquitos and a remarkably circuitous route to the Elbe that few outsiders would ever discover.

Our hostess, at first, told us that the only way into Pirna from here was back the way we came, but her husband arrived and told us there was a way to skirt the construction zone, and he would lead us through. We followed behind his car through private gates, up bike paths, and through a works yard and into town. He left us at the market centre, and returned home to his family.

It was too early for dinner, but John and Ezra were hungry, so we stopped into a bakery (sometimes bakeries make sandwiches). This bakery had mostly pastries, but a customer offered to walk us to one that sold sandwiches. On the way through a cobbled pedestrian-only shopping area, we passed by more than one bakery/sandwich places, but our guide led us to the best, and then carried on his way.

We travel for the encounters with people, don’t we? Today was a day of encounters, of remarkable friendliness and generosity.

Tomorrow we’ll explore the landscape, but I bet it won’t go out of its way to make memories for us.


Photos from Pirna and the Saechische-Schweiz, complete with climbers.

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