Day 283:Garden-Kingdom of Worlitz-Dessau

Woke up to the sound of Schnitzel retching and spewing all over the floor. In the process of cleaning that up we discovered that he'd also spewed on the bed! Couldn't get worse I suppose! Until of course the sink clogged as we were trying to dispose of the chunks, so our sink was full of gross coloured water and half-chewed dog biscuits. Yuck.

Decided to press on with our day anyway, a visit to the Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Worlitz - one of the oldest and most famous English gardens on the continent. Managed to explain to the cleaning lady (who spoke no English) that the sink was blocked, though we didn't specify what had caused it. Also managed to explain that most of the lights in our room didn't work!

Just made it to the station in time for the train - it's super weird here since there's three trains per hour, but they're all within about 20 minutes of each other. 40 minutes past the hour, 50 minutes, and 55 minutes - then nothing for 45 minutes. Go figure. But we made it, thankfully.

Got to Dessau with 15 minutes to spare until our connecting bus, so Shandos grabbed a croissant and I went and bought tickets from the machine. Waited at the bus stop and the bus never came, and a man said the bus had already left! Realised that we'd been looking online at an old timetable, and that the bus was at 5 past, not 13 past. And of course the next one was in an hour! Could this day get any worse?

Back inside the station where we settled into the coffee shop again, I had a coffee and Shandos had another croissant. Eventually we headed back outside for the bus, and when we boarded we discovered this was a private bus, and so the tickets I'd spent 10 euros on didn't apply as they were only for the public bus services! Another 10 euros. Fucks sake.

Thankfully the 30 minute bus trip out to the park passed without incident - we were the only people on the bus the entire way! After all of that, the park was lovely. Free entry, dogs and filming allowed, and only a couple of the attractions were covered in scaffolding for restoration. This was one of the first English gardens in Germany, and the aristocrat who designed it (Duke Leopold III) had just been on a Grand Tour of the Europe, and wanted to bring the ideas of the Enlightenment back to his home duchy.

So the garden has a synagogue designed like the Tivoli Villa in Siena, a scale model of the Pantheon in Rome, and strangely, a fake volcano apparently inspired by Mount Vesuvius! It does "erupt", but sadly not during the winter months. We weren't quite the only people in the park, but not far from it! It covers an enormous area, but we just wandered around looking at the various follies and filming where we pleased. And the rain mostly held off too, which was nice!

Decided to head back on the 1:10 bus, which turned out to actually be the 1:25 bus. So we arrived back in Dessau with about 15 minutes to the train, and very hungry since we hadn't had lunch. I went over to the information counter and pleaded my case, and thankfully the nice lady refunded my ticket purchase from this morning, so the day improved slightly!

Grabbed a roll from Subway and made the train before walking home. The apartment was clean, the sink was unblocked, the lights were working and the sheets had been changed. There wasn't any dog vomit around when we left, so I don't know what the cleaning lady made of the brown stain on the sheets. Best not to ask!

Later on Shandos walked back to the station where there was a supermarket, and grabbed a couple of things for dinner. That's the main disadvantage of staying somewhere out of the way without a car - you feel quite isolated and don't have many options should you need them! But at least the awful day was over, and wasn't too bad in the end - most issues had been resolved.Read more