So, I have finally reached my last post in this series covering our visits to Karlovy Vary, Vyoske Tatry, Krakow, and Dresden. In retrospect, this trip was one of our best vacations. It even rivals our trip to Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia, back in 2021! The best part is, we didn’t do this trip during a pandemic… although given what happened on our way home, maybe it would have been better if I’d
“masked up”.

We woke up to cloudy Dresden skies on October 13th. It happened to be my sister’s birthday, so I sent her a birthday message. Then, Bill and I got dressed and went to breakfast in the Moritz restaurant. Since we needed to get on the road, Bill and I stuck to the buffet.

After breakfast, Bill called the front desk to ask them to bring our car around. Then we hauled our bags down to the lobby and Bill settled our bill. I had already paid for the room, so we just had to pay for the city taxes and parking, and we got a slight discount for skipping housekeeping. We loaded up our car and headed out, immediately getting turned around at a roundabout and construction…

On our way out of Dresden, we passed a train station, where gay pride was on display. I love this about Germany. They are all about being inclusive… or, at least a lot of people are, anyway.

The sun came out for a brief time as we passed the local Russian Orthodox Church…

I’m afraid things got more boring once we left Dresden. The clouds came back, then we got rain, and the terrain was the usual German countryside that has become so familiar to me over the years. But I took a few photos, anyway, just to pass the time.

And then it happened. We crossed the border into Hessen, which is the state where we currently live. We had about 90 minutes left in our drive, and we needed a break. So Bill pulled off at a rest stop.

Rain was falling and it was chilly. The rest stop had a Burger King and a Gusticus, as well as a gas station and toilets. But it was laid out weirdly. Usually, at German rest stops, the doors are at the front of the building, and there’s no barrier on either side. If someone is walking slowly, you can easily pass them to enter.

At this stop, which was at Rimberg Nord, just off the A5, there were two entrances at the back of the building. The one closest to us had a single door, and there was a barrier on the other side of the sidewalk leading up to it. We were rushing to the door, to escape the rain, when we encountered a woman with a girl who appeared to be her daughter. The girl looked to be about ten or eleven years old.

As we approached the walkway, the woman and the girl stopped, and the girl vomited right in front of us. They were also blocking the way into the entrance, because they stopped at the end of the walkway and had the building on one side, and the barrier on the other. Perhaps that was a sign that we should walk the other way. But we waited for her to finish, which took a minute or two. We went into the restaurant, which was crowded with elderly tourists from a bus parked outside.

The interior of the rest stop was kind of weird. Instead of the big open layout one usually finds at German rest stops, this place had smaller rooms connected by corridors. I think that, somehow, we were exposed to the nasty virus Bill and I have had all week. It was either the vomiting girl on the way in, or someone in the large group of tourists. I’m sure eating Burger King didn’t help. The Gusticus was closed, not that it would have been that much better. When we left the rest stop, the girl’s puke was still on the sidewalk.

Anyway, the upshot is, less than 48 hours after we got home, I started feeling sick with a respiratory virus that laid me out all last week. Bill also got the bug, although it doesn’t seem to have made him as sick as it made me. I am mostly over the bug now. I just have a residual cough and a lot of fatigue. But that was a rotten way to end what was otherwise an epic trip to Eastern Europe.

Since we got back from Eastern Europe, I have looked back on our trip with amazement. I wish we could have done more… and if I had to do it over again, perhaps I would have done two nights in Karlovy Vary and two nights in Dresden. I would have liked to have spent more time in Vyoske Tatry and Krakow. But overall, we had a wonderful time on our journey, and it was such great thing to get a change of scenery.

Just this morning, Bill said he was feeling better at work, even though he’s been very busy. Next week, he has to go to the US, and then after that, there’s another business trip. At the end of November, we will celebrate our wedding anniversary with a belated trip to a lovely hotel in Switzerland. So that will keep the travel blog going…

Anyway, so ends my blow by blow reporting on our Eastern European October. We just changed the clocks back to standard time, so it seems later than it is. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series, and will stay tuned for my usual ten things I learned post!