Germany 2017 Post 12

On to Weißenberg. I'm glad we were ignorant of the travel we would endure. Note to others: Easter is a big deal in Germany. Easter Monday is a bank holiday and we figured that Thursday would be a good day to drive from Dessau to Tuttendorf. Ha ha ha.

Sooooo...we left Dessau on the Thursday before Easter. In the week we'd been in Germany the trees everywhere were going from sticks, to buds to flowers. I had never seen forsythia before, and it was just about poking my eyes out with its screaming yellow flowers. Wowsa. Germany is beautiful, but getting to watch this transformation was really amazing.

OK, but on to the trip. I asked mrguy if we could stop in Freiberg. This is where my first immigrant ancestor, the one who started my interest in the German side, was born. His father, married to Gottlob's daughter, was Wendish, and he became a famous physician and mineralogist. Freiberg is a mining town, has Europe's first and oldest mining school, and is rock crazy. We went to see St. Petri church where my guy was baptized, and then got a spot of lunch at the Rathskeller. Notice the rock detail around the door?

Next to the table where we were sitting were these cool dioramas about mining. They were created by a man named Alfred Mende, a well-known citizen who made his living carving scenes and displaying them in a cabinet you could view for a price. For more information, see the Wikipedia citation. So cool. I so want one of these mining dioramas.

After lunch, and a brief visit to the local Saxony tourist store where we're *pretty* sure we interrupted a little afternoon delight between the owners, we started our journey to Weißenberg. Uh oh. The traffic made it almost impossible to even get out of town. Then it started to get dark and rain hard and there were many detours. Then we used our navigation system to work around some of the detours. And as it got darker and rainier and took longer, we became more apprehensive. We could no longer see the A-4 during some of these "long cuts" and that was worrisome, also.

At one point after an hour or so the navigation took us down a pedestrian walkway, where a grandfather pushing a child in a stroller was very surprised to see us, and then I had mrguy navigate our car through someone's muddy back yard. Very soon after, mrguy said firmly and rather loudly "I am about to really lose my shit! We are stopping at the next building we see". This turned out to be Julius Kost, in Wilsdruff, where we had one of the most magical dinners of our lives.