Childhood Places and a Heatwave

Remembering Dresden

I stayed in Dresden for somewhere between four and six weeks. I’m honestly not sure anymore. What I do remember is leaving the city on short notice after about a month, and coming back a week or so later to collect the motorcycle.

Which tells you roughly how the “explore the region on weekends” part of the plan went.

A day trip into the past

The only bigger ride I took during that time was a day trip to a few places from my childhood.

First on the list was Bautzen, which I’d wanted to visit for a while, mostly to find out why it’s called the city of towers.

Then:

• Posterstein Castle, where my father used to take me on a regular basis.
• Berggießhübel, the small village where parts of my family once lived.
• Pirna, with its Sonnenstein district, which for some reason I had filed in my head as part of Dresden.

It isn’t. The best explanation I could come up with: I was so small when we visited my grandmother there that the short drive from Dresden made both feel like the same place. Children are terrible at municipal boundaries.

Squeezing those last three into one day turned out to be a very nice, very scenic route along the edge of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains.

The long way out

Long story short: after a couple of weeks, I left Dresden to bring the motorcycle back home. It didn’t fit in my backpack, so riding the whole way back it was.

Instead of retracing the way I came, I picked a different direction — through Halle and along the northern parts of the Harz. A good choice, as it turned out, because it ended with a night in a castle. More on that in a moment.

I left in the middle of a summer heatwave and fully expected to die of sweating inside my gear.

I didn’t. Even at 32 degrees and above, my Dainese jacket refused to become a pizza oven and moved the air through surprisingly well. Even stuck in traffic, it never got unbearable.

Rude of it, really, to be that good when I’d prepared myself for suffering.

Lesson of the stay

Eastern Germany — Dresden, and Saxony in general — is a wonderful place. Scenic heaven for motorcyclists, and I’d somehow spent most of my life only visiting it.