Day 5: Cycling from Berlin to Athens

Day 5

Rest Day in Dresden

We were very pleased to be taking a rest day and Dresden was a great place for it, we hadn't realised that it was such a nice city. We were also very lucky that a city festival was going on in the evening, from right outside our hotel.

Chilled out in Dresden

The Massage

We decided to get a sports massage in order to rest properly and to rejuvenate our muscles which are not used to so much cycling. We looked online for a sports massage close to our hotel and we found one with an epic name - Yin & Tonic - and they offered an hour long NYC Massage. We decided to pop in on the way to the old town and see if we could have the massage and/or book for later. The studio was inside a serviced apartment block and we rang the bell on the correct apartment and there was no answer. We almost gave up to find a new place but I messaged them on Facebook to see if that would work and it did! There was one masseuse so we booked in one after the other and it was fantastic - he did a great job, it was quite painful at times but my muscles felt a lot better after it.

Laundry

The most important activity of rest day. Strangely enough quite a few of the options had terrible reviews online so we jumped on the tram to the trendy part of town where we had dinner the night before. The laundry went pretty smoothly, we went for breakfast whilst it was washing and then to pick up some moisturiser and a hairbrush for the drying time.

The hipster part of town

Canaletto Festival

We happened to be in Dresden for Stadtfest 2017, which this year had the slogan: Dresden: Surprisingly Different celebrating the Saxon city capital's 811th anniversary. There were hundreds of food trucks, amusement rides and music performances along the river and in the old part of the city. We ate some French crepes, German garlic bread and Russian - a flatbread, pizza style dish. We got the last one packed up as it had started raining but the wind really whipped up and there was lightening in the sky so we thought we had better head back to the hotel. Good thing we did, 5 minutes later when we were home and dry the heavens opened and the rain came down, thunder, lightening and high winds! We saw quite a few people running for shelter and we felt bad for the stall holders, but we think the festival runs all weekend so hopefully they will have better luck.

International food stalls 

Chocolate ice-cream I tried with rosemary