Elbe Sandstone Mountains
One night was spent outside the town of Seiffen. This town is a tourist destination, primarily for the woodcraft and painted Christmas figures. John in his orange bike jersey fits in nicely with some of the local color, don´t you think?
This is our first trip to Europe. I came to Germany, the birthplace of my parents, with few pre-conceived expectations of what I would discover. But I was surprised to find things that have made me understand my parents so much more. Why they love wurst and potatoes - they are eaten at least once a day by most Germans, and admittedly the potatoes here taste so good. Especially the small new potatoes that my aunt purchased from a local farmer, so fresh and still covered with soil from the field. And why my mother loves to swim. Community swimming pools are in many German towns, and some are huge with green space all around. People come from all over on a hot day to swim and enjoy the sun (sometimes too much so they resemble the roasted sausages that they so love to eat). And many a German will wake up early in the morning to take a healthy dip in a natural lake if on is nearby. My mother did the same thing on many of our camping trips, even if it was an icy Sierra lake. And as our route took us closer to Dresden, my mother's birthplace, reminders from the German culture of my childhood pop up. One is the local style of woodcraft that we saw in Seiffen - the small Christmas figures were the same my mother set out during the holidays that I played with for hours as a young child. It made me miss my mother just a bit...
To the east of the city of Dresden is a landscape called the Elbsandsteingebirge -- the Elbe Sandstone Mountains. It is a mountain range dominated by distinctive weathering of horizontal sandstone layers. In this land of dense vegetation that obscures any indication of the underlying geology, we found that the Germans are quite proud of any rock outcrop. But this area is quite distinctive, popular among local rock climbers, and deserving of the attention it receives.
The mountain range can be experienced from roads that bisect the range, like the one we followed along the tracks of the tourist train to the town of Hinterhermsdorf.