Day 3, Tuesday April 16th! Here’s my short recap from Instagram:

Day 3 (April 16) in Europe was a travel day. AMS 👉 FRA 👉 DRS. I highly recommend NOT connecting in Frankfort, Germany if you can avoid it 😂 But hey! That Duty Free shop did have vegan Kit Kats, and I was very excited about that!

4:30 ALARM WHHHHHHHHHY 

This ding dang early wake up call UGH! When Amber planned our trip this was a direct flight from Amsterdam to Dresden on KLM at a reasonable departure time. Then KLM dropped flights to Dresden. The option was to fly KLM to Frankfurt then fly Lufthansa to Dresden. The problems were: 1. I wanted to avoid layovers, 2. the layover was about 4 hours long!, and 3. the departure time was now 8:25 am, which meant meeting our driver at 5:30 am, hence the early wake up.

We were on vacay with no big obligations. It’s all good. But boy, did I look tired that day. Whoa.

We dropped our big bag with KLM, and went on our way with our carry on, my backpack, and Steven’s laptop. I’m VERY proud of how “little” I packed for this trip. We both brought just a few things to wear a few times (and did laundry midway through the trip) and I used everything I brought! Also, it doesn’t really matter what I brought to wear because it was coat weather the whole time, so you mostly just see my red coat in photos. Sigh. Moving on.

The folks at KLM were super nice. We went through security and found our gate and had tons of time to spare so we walked all the way back to Starbucks for a chai for me, then tried to find some savory breakfast for Steven that didn’t have meat and/or hadn’t been sitting out for who knows how long (We saw that often – premade sandwiches sitting out to grab. It seemed common there (and I remember it from living in Italy) but it wasn’t appealing.). He was unsuccessful and began his new routine of eating a croissant for breakfast. He also got some Dutch apple pie to try. I found nothing vegan to eat so I had some of the snack rice cakes Anita got for us. Details that do not matter… moving on…

I was surprised that we walked out on the ramp to board our flight! I’m a snob and only want to be doing that if my husband is the pilot. I KID I KID. I totally didn’t mind, although the wind was a bit nuts.

I was happy this plane had rows of two so I took the aisle and Steven took the window and we napped a bit and I read and we landed in Frankfurt quickly – the flight was under an hour!

WE SHOULD HAVE PLENTY OF TIME WITH A FOUR HOUR LAYOVER… RIGHT?

Oh, Frankfurt Airport. You are… something… something I will try to avoid in the future!

So, I was super annoyed with this long ass layover and how much of my Europe time it was going to eat up. But I told myself things like “You can use this time to read! Or catch up on socials! Or edit photos.”

No. This was NOT a chill layover. At least the beginning.

It starts with us deboarding and getting off on the ramp … to take a bus… to the terminal? Huh?! This is strange. But hey, we have ALL THE TIME in the world. There’s no rush.

We finally get inside a terminal, and it’s Terminal D or something, and we need to be in Terminal A for our flight to Dresden. So we find a tram that will take us to A.

We are riding the tram, on the second to last stop to A, and a worker gets on and talks to us in German. Oh that’s right, we’re in Germany now! It’s all on you, Steven! (He brushed up on German, I tried to learn Dutch.)

She asks us if we have tickets. Steven thinks “tickets for the tram?” then “wait, no we don’t need tickets to ride the tram ha ha we are so tired” and we realize she means tickets for a flight. Actually NO, we do not have our Lufthansa ticket. My dumbass just assumed I would somehow get it at the gate?

Ha, oh, no, we need to exit and go back through security. Er….

So, long story even longer, we walk forever and get to the departure hall then have a bit of a hard time figuring out how to check in then finally figure it out, then go through security again, then finally get to our gate.

About two hours later.

We would have been SCREWED if we had a shorter layover. I am SHOCKED to be happy that layover was so long.

Oh! And I forgot to mention, we walked through Duty Free (as they force you to) and I saw they had the Vegan Kit Kats, which I have not found anywhere in the states!

I had one after lunch and they taste just like the real thing. Yum! I ate so much chocolate on this trip.

Okay so we had two hours to kill. We walked around, I got excited about pretzels and sent photos to my snister (it was so nice to be able to text during this trip! I did a photo dump to her and my mom each morning, and randomly text pics to them and my dad),

I got excited seeing vegan things on menus, we looked at huge planes,

and I hid a rock for a friend (I hid more of other people’s rocks than my own on this trip!). Then we got salads and drinks at Natoo, and I had the best chai I had on the whole trip!

Blah blah blah, we hung out, our flight was delayed (ugh), I ate that kit kat, and we got on a bus that took us to the ramp to board our plane to Dresden.

Later, Frankfurt! Our flight was an hour long. These short flights were nice after such a long one to get to Europe!

ARRIVING IN DRESDEN

We noticed yellow fields on the flight in and I learned they are rapeseed. Very cool to see them in bloom! Not cool for people who have allergies, but that’s not us.

Getting our bag in Dresden was a breeze. It was a super small airport compared to Frankfurt – one terminal, and just a few gates. It made me excited to fly back through it (and I was now nervous about our one and a half hour layover on the way to Brussels via Frankfurt in a few days but more on that later).

We picked up our rental car at Hertz. We decided to rent a car so we could drive to Leipzig the next day to see Katja and her kids, and so that we’d have it to drive around to see a castle (and maybe go hiking) the next day.

We watched some videos about driving in Germany before we left and I looked up road signs and kept that website open on my phone for the entirety of our time in Germany. The big things (to me, but I was not the driver so take this with a grain of salt) were all the different road signs, no right turns on red, and to only go into the left lane to pass. Seriously, Germans and their rule following is a dream come true to me. More on that when I talk about my Friday morning run.

We got to our hotel and I remembered the reservation said something about a city view. Our hotel was across from Kreuzkirche Dresden (below),

and I was really hoping we’d get a view of it from our room.

UM… GUYS… we had an amazing 180° view of Kreuzkirche Dresden and Altmarkt! I walked in to our room and my mouth was agape. We had a living area, a lounge area, a bathroom, and a huge bedroom. SO MUCH ROOM FOR ACTIVITIES!

This was our favorite hotel (NH Collection) of the trip! And we utilized that space when we had a chill morning on Thursday. Highly recommend.

EXPLORING DRESDEN

We got to our hotel around 4:30 and had a dinner reservation at 7:00. As nice as the room was, I didn’t want to waste daylight (ahh! I need to mention how nice it was that it was light until after 8:00 every night we were there!), so we settled for a second then explored. There was a huge gallery (mall) by us and I saw an Aldi and promised myself I would come back later. I am a HUGE Aldi fan.

Then we wandered around and admired the architecture.

This is Fürstenzug – a 101 meter long porcelain mural depicting Saxon rulers through the ages.

This is Frauenkirche.

This part of the trip is when Steven really started teasing me about my internal compass being off. I normally have stellar navigation skills but damn Europe and their lack of a grid system! I had us go the wrong direction a few times. Oops. We were a bit late for our reservation, but it didn’t matter.

DINNER AT STEFFENHAGEN

Because we had so much success with the tram in Amsterdam, we decided to take it in Dresden that night. But you couldn’t just tap like we did in Amsterdam – you had to buy a ticket once you got on (you could on machines before you got on but the one we tried was broken). We did it that night to get to dinner and back, then used the car after.

I had read a blog post about Dresden vegan places and they mentioned how amazing Steffenhagen was, so I had Steven make a reservation well in advance.

Reservations in Europe are interesting to me. In the US when I make one, it’s like I might get a table then, or might have to wait, but I will definitely get a table at SOME point. In Europe (at least our experience), they have your table reserved well before you’re there. It’s nice.

We got a bunch of traditional dishes to try! We got Hermelin for an appetizer – vegan cheese, bread, and veggies. Seriously some of the BEST vegan cheese we’ve ever had. Steven got the Schnitzel, I got the Ungarische Paprikasch (Hungarian Peppers – basically seitan goulash!), then we got dessert to share.

The food was all divine. Steven said how much he liked it and it made me feel really good that I found an all vegan restaurant he liked, because in Amsterdam he had commented on how maybe all vegan restaurants were NOT the way to go, since we’d had some hit or miss experiences. We had been discussing how maybe we should just go to regular restaurants since they seemed to have vegan options too, but it turned out Dresden’s vegan scene was LIT and it was only going to get better from there – we noticed lots of vegan restaurants around this one and many vegan items on menus closer to our hotel!

ANOTHER LATE NIGHT?

At home, I’m not a night owl. I am an early bird. Apparently in Europe, I am both. Late dinners, staying up late, just enjoying where we are and being together… it was lovely. I had to maximize each day, especially the travel ones! And I slept really well each night there too, so that helped. We went to bed around 11:00 on Tuesday and had a 6:00 am wakeup call to get to Leipzig the next day, so not too bad!