Rathen to Gorlitz

This morning during breakfast we found that the castle has WiFi (the gastehaus we were staying in did not) and there was an email from a place in Gorlitz. It sounded good, so we're going to spend a couple days there. We shot off a quick reply (using Google's translation page), wrote down the address and sketched out a map, and then headed across the river for the train station.

When Beth took our key back to the castle from the gastehaus I took the photo below. The pathway heads up the hill to the right in the bottom of the photo and you can see Beth heading to the left near the top. The trail doubles back again above her, and at the very top of the photo you can see the castle. Steep.



Deutsche Bahn has these great terminals for buying tickets. They're multi-lingual and extremely well organized, so you can plan a trip to just about anywhere in Germany in just a few minutes.



The train ride to Gorlitz took the balance of the morning, and we arrived in the main station a little after 1:00. The gastehaus was one km down the street and we found it without difficulty, but I wasn't able to find any of the cross streets on my map. The street signs (which are plentiful) use a stylized script which is tough to decipher. The second time through I was able to pick out the names and by the end of the afternoon I could read the signs fairly easily, but there was definitely a learning curve.

As we walked toward the town center we passed through Lutherplatz and an old church. I'm not sure if the Big Guy out front was Martin Luther, but it seems like a reasonable guess.



We found a bakery and had a late lunch of pizza and pastries.



In town we stumbled across Fleischerstrasse, and since Beth's ancestors were Fleischmans it seemed worthy of a picture. In the background is the watchman's tower which was used to keep an eye out for invaders and fires.



We didn't really have a plan for this afternoon, and as we continued to wander around we came across a section of the old wall around the city that was open as a garden. It looks like it was a double-wall, with one section below the path and another above.



We looped back to the gastehaus to check into our room (we'd just dropped off our packs earler) and see about finding an Internet connection. The owner didn't know of any nearby hot spots, but readily offered to let us use his laptop. We used a web site for a room finding service in Prague and sent off a request via emai. We'll be hitting Prague near the weekend, so we'd like to make sure we have rooms nailed down in advance.

Below is an overview map of the day -- we started out in Rathen (near the bottom), took a train back trough Dresden and then on the Gorlitz.


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