Usedom

Thank you everyone for your lovely comments and well-wishes last Friday.  Taking a break away, even if it was only for 24 hours was wonderful.  It made the weekend feel just that little bit longer and even though it was cold, the weather was sunny and perfect for walking along the beach and taking my fill of the sea air.  Autumn colours were definitely in full-swing up in the north - lots of photos to share, but for now just a few.

It's the light beautiful?  This little glen was hidden just to the right of the path up a small embankment.  It was just like this, with the light streaming through the trees and a misty, magical kind of atmosphere to the place. I could have spent hours here, but we had more important things to do, like drink coffee and admire old DDR relics like this funny old train and wish we'd bought a kite to fly in the wind.

As a complete aside to all of this, I was again impressed by the efficiently of Germany's rail service.  We needed four connections to get from Zinnowitz to our house on Saturday night.  All the connections were on time, trains often "met" at the train station making it easy to move between one service and another.  All you had to do was disembark from one train, walk across the platform and get on your waiting train on the opposite side.  The longest we waited was 5 minutes for our tram to take us the last 1km from the train station to our apartment. It was by far the least stressful way to get to Usedom on a Friday night and meant we had an enforced 3 hours of sleeping and relaxing time on the train. I really do love German efficiency sometimes.