(Dresden)

This blog has been quiet for a few weeks, although I have certainly been putting in a lot of miles. I haven’t been travelling much for travel’s sake, but my sports activities have taken me to places like Oshawa, Cobourg, Belleville…and Dresden.

Dresden is a city of more than half a million people. It is the capital of the eastern German state of Saxony.  And I did indeed visit “Dresden” recently, and I stayed in the “Saxony Motel” (see photo at top of this post).  However, instead of a re-emerging city in the former East Germany, I was in an altogether different kind of Dresden.  

6 hours west of Kingston is the small (population 2, 800) agricultural community of Dresden, Ontario, and I was there to participate in the provincial pairs lawn bowling championships .  This was precisely the type of “random” travel experience I hoped would unfold this summer.   I thought Dresden might be vaguely like Hanover (another Ontario town named after a German city). which I also visited more or less at random in 2015.  However, Dresden was quite a bit smaller…and smelled a bit like tomato soup!  I wasn’t just imagining this: there is a ketchup and vegetable canning factory right across the street from the lawn bowling club.

The heat was intense, so quite a bit of my time in Dresden (and in the nearby city of Chatham, where the Saxony Motel was located) was spent keeping cool and out of the sun.  But I still enjoyed the slower place of life, and catching up with people I had met at previous tournaments.  The side streets of Dresden were well-maintained and had plenty of Victorian red brick homes. 

I hope that my summer will continue to offer experiences like this one, although slightly cooler temperatures would be nice! And even if I am not be travelling quite as far as in previous summers (Chile is not in the cards this year). I do have some fun plans simmering in the background.  I will be heading overseas in the winter…and maybe even before then?