Onto the Medieval town of Bamberg as our first port of call today and we luckily arrived before the mega amounts of tourist buses did, leaving as the groups started to pour in. This city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and really pretty, like something from a story book and I want to go back and visit it again because our short visit didn't do it justice. The timber buildings, the painted facades, decorated bridges, the Altenburg castle, as well as the cathedral and medieval rose garden with its view down to the city, just captured my imagination, unfortunately our fly-by visit didn't do it the justice it deserves, we sadly did not have enough time to really explore.
After Bamberg we cycled to Lichtenfelds where we again caught a train, this time it was a longer ride and skipped the only big hill on our journey (I think Christoph had secretly decided this in advance) that brought us into Saalfeld. We didn't really want to catch the train and we missed out a few things I wanted to see but we needed to make up time and again, the hot weather was battering us. We will have to come back another time and climb that hill ha ha ha.
On the way to Lichtenfelds we stopped at a lake that seemed to be surrounded by private entrances, we were so hot and heat grumpy that we just gate crashed a group of people chilling there and asked if we could take a quick dip from their entrance point to the water, which really was just a stone step and a few sandbags into the lake, I don't know if it was really they're own private entrance but they were protective and not too amused by our appearance, but our charm worked and we swam in the beautiful warm lake with a view to Banz Abby that serenely watched us from above.
Onto Saalfeld in Thüringen nestled along the Saale River, this would turn out to be my favourite state in German, even thought it's hard to beat the Black forest. What I can say is, from the moment we left the train, there was just a whole new vibe in the air, it suddenly felt like holiday, it was softer, relaxed, warm, creative... it just felt good. The funny thing was, when we arrived at the campsite where we wanted to stay we found that it had been taken over by visitors to The Innerlight Festival https://innerlightfestival.de/family/programm/musik/ that had just started and the whole area was filled with creative bohemian looking people, walking barefoot, swimming naked in the river, doing yoga, being creative with body paint, it was really gentle and open, it matched the relaxed vibe we'd experienced getting off the train, almost as if it was meant to be.
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