This holiday slot in our diaries had been planned as another sailing trip on Trinovante, intended to be Orkney to Shetland via Fair Isle, but Su and John finally decided to hang up their sailing boots. We briefly contemplated heading north anyway, but in the end decided to head east and link together a number of places we’d wanted to visit, in some cases for quite a while.
Day 1 – arrival in Halle (Saale)
Day 2 – Ziegelwiese parkrun
At one stage, Ziegelwiese parkrun in Halle had been on the target list to help complete the alphabet of parkrun names, but we ended up ticking off our “Z” with Zuiderpark in The Hague last year. But the attraction of the idea remained (and a good start on the second alphabet), especially in conjunction with the opportunity for a schnitzel restauarant. So Saturday morning saw us leaving our apartment and making our way across Halle to Ziegelwiese park, located on a island between the main channel of the Saale river and a mill stream.
Day 3 – Harz railway to The Brocken
Our reason for coming to Nordhausen for two nights was to travel on the Harz railway, today to the summit of The Brocken.
We had lunch in the restaurant at the top before catching the train back down, emerging below the cloud into gradually drier weather. A great outing – a shame about the fog, but you have to be lucky, planning months in advance, to get one of the few clear/sunny days.
Day 4 – Nordhausen to Hamburg
The original plan had been to use the third of the three lines of the Harz railways to take us to Quedlinburg, there to pick up the mainline railway. But there had been timetable changes which left us with a rail-replacement bus for part of the journey, and already another part was due to be diesel rather than steam, so in the end we decided to save a few euros and get the DB trains west from Nordhausen to Northeim, Hannover and Hamburg, where we walked to our nearby hotel. We found a good steakhouse for dinner in the evening.
Day 5 – Miniatur Wunderland
Day 6 – Hamburg
Day 7 – Lübeck
We had a day trip to Hamburg to Lübeck.
Day 8 – Hamburg to Copenhagen
After we’d checked out of the hotel, we went on a open-top bus tour of the city, seeing at least fleetingly some of the sights we hadn’t seen in person – though we don’t appear to have taken any photos.
We then caught our train from Hamburg to Copenhagen – fortunately we got our booked seats but there were a lot of people standing as the previous service had been cancelled.