We had an earlyish start with a 7.30 taxi to the airport. Check in was fine and we were set to arrive in Prague about an hour before Jen, who was coming from Istanbul. 

All good to Frankfurt but unfortunately (for a bird) the incoming flight hit the bird and then had to be checked before they could offload passengers so we were an hour late and arrived in Prague at the same time as Jen. 

We have a VW manual rental car which thankfully Jen has been driving as my scratchy eye makes vision uncomfortable. 

The apartment is in Chemnitz which is a largish regional city in eastern Germany (in Saxony).  It’s a large apartment with 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms but has an odd layout. Both bathrooms and toilets are adjoining and there’s a bedroom in between the kitchen/dining room and the lounge. There is a garage with parks but not enough for the whole building so you have to be lucky. No laundry unfortunately. 

We decided we wanted sausage and sauerkraut so walked first to the Aldi for some supermarket items and then to this local pub restaurant. No sausages of any kind there but they had some tasty goulash with sauerkraut so we all ordered that. We were hungry too as hadn’t had much all day. 

Up early on Friday to get to the parking and shuttle to the MotoGP, which is on at the Sachsenring, about 20km from where we are staying. The motor racing circuit is in the middle of these pretty German villages. We assume they rent out their homes on race weekends. 

The bus shuttles are very efficient. We had difficulty finding our stand though as it is hard to find a course map, either on their app or physically at the site. We watched some warm up sessions from other stands as no one was checking tickets on warm up day. 

It’s pretty noisy and hot but an amazing experience. The place is vast with stands all over the place and people everywhere. They have loads of different food stands. Every type of hot dog and burger you could imagine. Also every type of drink.

Coffee, beers and cocktails, all available from 9am in the morning. The crowd was consuming a lot of beer as it was so hot. Fortunately you can refill your water from the taps in the loos. Our stand was miles from where we went originally but it has great loos. No portaloos for us!  No shade either!

Friday is the practice day but it is also when riders get allocated their heat for the time trials on Saturday. It was interesting but actually racing will be more exciting. 

We got the shuttle back to the car park after a look around the fan zone. It was very efficient given the number of people at the event. 

It was a non eventful trip home (yay) except that there was no car park available so we had to find a park on the street. 

Jen has identified a suitable restaurant for dinner. We actually have not eaten that much all day and the food and drink places only take cash which is annoying. 

The walk there was along this tree lined street past this lake and park.

Chemnitz isn’t the prettiest city in Saxony but it’s trying hard!