… one of those nights where a bomb could have gone off in the vicinity and I wouldn’t have paid it the slightest moment of attention.

Here on this rest area on the autobahn towards Leipzig, I slept the sleep of the dead until the alarm went off at 07:30 and it was a struggle to rise up and make breakfast.

Back on the road though, with a nice hot coffee, I carried on heading south. And it didn’t take too long to arrive at my destination.

Here I am at Colditz Castle, and this is another one of my lifetime ambitions fulfilled. Brought up on a diet of RAF stories and PoW escape books, I’ve been wanting to come here for years.

Visits to the castle under the Communist regime were strictly discouraged and in fact most of the prisoner artefacts that were still here in 1955 had long gone by the time the Communists left.

Nevertheless, there were still plenty of surprises to come.

A digger working up on one of the courtyards suddenly disappeared from view as the courtyard collapsed underneath it. Closer inspection revealed the remains of an escape tunnel (a French one, as it happens) that the Germans had failed to uncover. Its discovery certainly took everyone, especially the digger driver, quite by surprise.

Another surprise was sprung on the roofers.

When they lifted off some of the tiles to replace the roof, they found a hidden alcove with a radio receiving set from World War II still in it. This was one of the four secret radio rooms operated by the prisoners, and the only one that remained undiscovered.

Mind you, a great deal was already known about the history of the escape plans and it just remained to actually track them down.

Perhaps the most famous tunnel was the one that involved sliding down the weight chamber of the tower clock and digging out from the cellar. This had been filled in after the Germans had discovered it, but some of it has been unfilled as you can see.

Strawberry Moose is quite interested in giving them a hand, and maybe himself escaping from the castle.

The guided tour was quite expensive, but it was worth every penny and I really enjoyed my visit.

From here I headed south and crossed into the Czech Republic. Years since I’ve been here and Caliburn has never been here at all, and you may remember from last year that I’m trying to expand Caliburn’s sphere of operations.

I’ve ended up in a town called Zatec, not too far from Plzen. I was doing a tour of the town when I came across a hotel right in the centre. I couldn’t say fairer than that.

I know that I’m supposed to be sleeping in Caliburn as much as possible, but east of where the Iron Curtain used to be, the police sometimes still have attitude issues and it’s not as if the cost of living is expensive here.

The town itself is gorgeous, although there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the post-Communist economic miracle has not quite penetrated thoroughly into the region.

Mind you, this is the Sudetenland and the inhabitants, mostly of German origin, were ethnically cleansed out of the region in 1945-46. This might account for some of the issues here, although there’s nothing that I have seen that can detract from the beauty of the place.

There’s a fast food place across the road from the hotel so I resolved to call in on my way back from my walk so that I could pick up a plate of chips. But you can guess what has happened.

You would think that I would be used to this by now.