Potsdam; Saturday, 28 March, 2015

An early breakfast and then out over to the other side of the city centre to pick up the first tour bus of the morning. I did a full circuit of the route and as there was a 25 minute wait for the next departure I had a bit more of a wander around the city centre, before picking up the tour bus and going round to Park Sanssouci.

The Park was the location of the summer homes of the Prussian royal family with, seemingly every one building a new palace. Consequently the park is littered with exotic palaces from the impressively large Neues Palais to the picturesque 12 room Schloß Sanssouci.

As I’d already visited most of the palaces a number of years earlier – and let’s face it the key point about a preserved royal place is that they don’t change – I didn’t bother actually paying through the nose to go into any of them, but I had a long wander through the park taking in all the sights.

By now the weather had improved quite a bit and after catching a bus back into town I picked up the tram out to the Glinecker Bridge.

The bridge fell right across the border between the Western districts of West Berlin and East Germany and consequently was a closed off area to almost everyone right up until 1989. The bridge was also, famously, the location where spy swaps took place with Soviet and American spys making the walk across it to their respective freedoms.

In some ways I should have come to the bridge early in the morning when it was foggy and dark as that’s really the kind of weather you’d associate with a location like this, but on a sunny afternoon it did mean you could take in the pretty lakes and further castles of this area.

I caught the tram back into town and popped back to the hotel for a quick freshen up before heading out at dusk to catch a regular bus back over to Park Sanssouci.

I’d expected that, as with any other major attraction like this, it would be beautifully floodlit at night and I could get some good photos, but the whole area was in total darkness with just the limited moonlight providing any lighting options for a picture.

I headed back over to the hotel and decided to eat there for the evening, before turning in for the night.