Patariki Has a Day Out in Postsden

Saturday August 21st

After lots of talk and mind changing, Alan discovered he had copied notes about Postden to bring and so after they read them they decided that they should take another day to look at the Sanssouci Park and Palace. So they packed me into the backpack and managed to catch the 9.12 bus which meant they were in Postden not long after 10am.

They caught the bus that took them nearest the park and get off in the right place which was not a bad effort. They decided to walk around the gardens before the heat of the day, but Mary suddenly realised that they were walking away from the actual palace and it might take a bit of getting back to. So they climbed back up all the steps and found a huge queue had formed for tickets. What was more, it seemed to be hardly moving. Alan stood in the queue while Mary went and looked at the prices. While there she saw a notice saying that because of the big summer event the park would be closing early. So at this stage they decided to buy a ticket to the one palace only, rather than a combined one than all the palaces in the park. There were a few and one would be struggling to see them all in a day anyway.

When Alan finally made it to the ticket seller there was one woman only selling tickets and they were all computer generated and it took ages for her to deal with each customer. Their tickets were timed for 12.25, so they bought an extra one to view the ladies rooms while they were waiting. These were a gorgeous set of rooms for the ladies in waiting of the court. They wanted money for everything, extra to view the kitchens, and money to take photos or videos. While not bothering about the kitchens, Alan did buy a photo ticket but this slowed him down as he was the only one allowed to use the cameras.

The wait was worth it. The ticket included a very informative audio tour and the palace was quite charming. It was the summer residence of Frederick the Great. He didn’t spare much on his holiday home. Most impressive was the music room which had a gold spider web on the ceiling with three gold spiders in it. After viewing the palace there was not a lot of time left until the grounds closed so they shortened the walk and went to the Chinesisches Haus (Chinese tea house). It was lavishly decorated with gold all over the exterior. By this time they were quite thirsty and hungry and so they found the old Drachenhaus which had been built in 1770 as house for the gardener. It is now a restaurant. It was a very hot day so Mary finally got to have one of the huge icecream sundaes she had been wanting to try.

There was a bus stop at the bottom of the steps and so they consulted the timetable and it all looked good until a man came over and told them that the road was closed for the event and they would have to walk to the next one. They finally got a bus back into the railway station along with lots of other tourists speaking a great variety of languages.
It was one of the hottest days they have experienced on the trip so far and one way of cooling down on a day like this is to go on a boat cruise. So they found the 25% discount voucher and went and took a 1 ½ hour cruise on the waterways around Postdem. Every kind of boat you could think of was out on the water and the basin where they all turned around and tied up was a traffic jam. There were some pretty nice looking cruisers and yachts about, and some people in kayaks and pedal boats. There was even a pedal boat in the shape of a swan. By the time they got off the boat it was 6pm so they went back to the supermarket in the station to get cold meat and salad for tea. There was quite a long wait for the bus in Wasser and they finally got back to the camp at about 8pm. It was still a very warm evening so they sat out quite late as Hemi was very hot after being shut up all day.

Tomorrow they are planning a travelling day to Dresden and Mary got online and found the campsite so it is all programmed into the TomTom for the morning. Hopefully being a Sunday there will be less trucks on the road to contend with.