Thursday 19th May

There is a special purpose in our visit to Pirna. My friend Joe from East Devon believes that his relatives on his mother's side came from Pirna. This morning we took the foot ferry over the Elbe to look for traces of them.

Pirna town centre is quite picturesque - here's the town hall. We called in at the tourist information office and got a town map. Apparently there is only one cemetery in Pirna - we thought we might visit it to see if we could find any headstones with Joe's family names on them.

We visited the town museum who referred us on to the Pirna Archive housed in this old Schloss (castle) high above the town.

The Archivists were very helpful and gave us two enormous old books to look at which contained records of everyone who had lived in Pirna with the surname beginning B from 1835 to 1922. We found 5 records of families with the surname of Joe's ancestors. Unfortunately it was almost impossible to read more than the surname as the writing was very difficult to interpret.

We returned to our van over the foot ferry and then drove to the town cemetery which was a little far to walk. We spent quite a lot of time wandering around but couldn't find any headstones with the appropriate names.

We moved on west stopping briefly in the town of Colditz to photograph the famous castle which the Germans used to house escape prone prisoners of war in the Second World War.

We stopped for the night in the town of Bad Lausick in this very large car park close to the municipal swimming pool.

We came 75 miles (121 kilometres) today.