Dresden; Saturday, 20 July, 2013

Waking up at the same time as checkin was due to open is made so much less stressful when you are only five minutes’ walk from said checkin.

After checking out of my room I walked over to the terminal building, dropped off my bags and then wandered through to departures.

An uneventful morning in the airport, and in the end only a slight delay pushing back due to some delays in loading the bags. By the time we arrived at Berlin Tegel airport we’d made most of that time back.

My bag was the third one off the belt, and on exiting the terminal building there was a bus waiting to whisk me into town, so by the time I reached the Hauptbahnhof in the centre of Berlin I had nearly two hours to kill before my train to Leipzig, for the connection to Dresden.

In the end it was nearly 2 ½ hours to kill as the train was almost thirty minutes late into Berlin. Given that I only had 19 minutes to make the connection at Leipzig this was a little concerning.

Thankfully, the Germans never like to do things by half and rather than just having on train running late they had most of their trains delayed, so whilst the delay to the train from Leipzig to Dresden wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the train from Berlin to Leipzig, it was just long enough to enable the connection.

Just over an hour later I emerged from the Hauptbahnhof in Dresden and walked the short distance to the hotel, checked in and then headed into town for a wander.

I had a long wander round the Altstadt, taking in lots of the sights, before stopping off for a late night Bratwurst and the tram back to the hotel