A Friday Bike Ride

In Germany, everyone gets Good Friday and Easter Monday off.  We were pretty excited for a four day weekend, except that all the stores are also closed Friday, Sunday and Monday.

Yesterday I took the car to Elbe Park to the big, cheap grocery store and stocked us up on groceries for the weekend.  Not only did I look like the bag lady on my way back to the apartment from the parking garage, but I had a really hard time fitting all that food into our half-sized German fridge.  Good news is that we won't go hungry!

Today we decided to take a long bike ride to Rathen.

It's a beautiful ride down the Elberadweg.  We rode it last summer to the Bastei- which also involved a really long hike at the end of the bike ride.  This time we rode the path down the other side of the river.

The steam ships were out...

Here's our bikes taking a break

There were tons of other bikers out too- the path was beautiful and either ran by the river or through the trees

We saw some interesting things on our bike ride...

We saw a UFO

and a "crop square"

 We've been spending a lot of time outside now that the weather is nice, but I hadn't been on my bike since last summer.  It made for a pretty long bike ride... I was so glad to see this:

These cool mountain formations are the signature of the Sächsiche Schweiz.  That's how we knew we were there!

This is the town of Kurort (across from Rathen)

Rathen from the other side of the river

 The town of Rathen is really cute.  We spent some time roaming around the narrow pedestrian streets.  We decided to stop off at river-side restaurant called the Distillery.  They're famous for "the spirit of Rathen" and other fruity liquors made on site.  They didn't have much of a food menu, but we saw some people eating the daily special- flammkuchen, one of my favorite German "pizzas".  They are super thin crust, spread with quark (like cream cheese) and topped with bacon, scallions, cheese, and sometimes potatoes.  This flammkuchen was especially tasty and went fabulously with my cool glass of saurkirchsaft (cherry juice).

After our awesome lunch and a quick rest in the sun, we jumped on our bikes and rode home.  Nope, just kidding... remember how I said this was my first time on my bike since last summer?  Well, my legs held up pretty well, but bike seats are awfully uncomfortable.  Instead of riding home we boarded the extremely crowded train.  Unfortunately (or fortunately for our behinds) we had to stand the whole way home.

It was a fantastic day and it was so nice to be outside enjoying the summery weather!