We woke up the next day in Hamburg... a miracle in itself. I looked outside the window, which was facing southwest towards the train tracks, and it was pissing down.
By the time we packed everything and got all the luggage in the lobby, the rain stopped. I took this picture:
The bikes were secured to that first bicycle loop throughout the night. At this point, I was sharing these incredible achievements with my family. Of course, they thought I would have time to go visit things in Hamburg... they had no clue how much time it was taking us to get places and how far we still had to go to honour the plan. My sister told me to go visit the miniature museum. My mom told me to go see the Oldtimer Petrol Station that she has as a miniature and wants to do as a diorama.
If you're interested in that, here is a picture of it... HO scale... I think that's 1:87:
(FALLER 130591 H0 Tankstelle Brandshof)
We didn't have time for any miniature museums, so we decided to go take a picture at this old petrol station:
Of course, I messed up these pictures. Or IMGBOX did... Apparently, they still make TuVs for classic cars at that place. They also have a cafe, so we decided to stop for tea/coffee and plan the next part of the trip:
You're lucky this image is the right way round... you can zoom in and admire Yana.
She served us tea/coffee and two Florentiner Apfelkuchen. That's the cakes we had. They also had cheesecake and the German Classic, Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte.
They had things in the other room... like car bits and a lot of bulbs. We had an attempt to find the headlight bulb for the C90 without any luck, of course. I did ask Yana if she had stickers with this place, and sadly, the ones they had were too big.
Okay... so she was amazed about our tour... she asked about the C90s and whatnot. We mentioned to her that we were heading to Berlin, and she said: "Out of all the beautiful places in Germany, you chose to go to Berlin?" We said we had never seen Berlin, and it was on our list.
Yeah yeah... you like Yana... fine... She went ahead and showed us her IFA Simson (on her phone). It was really cool and refurbed to a very high standard. She said she paid a lot to have it done that way. She asked about the C90s as she had never seen anything like it before. Of course, her Simson was faster than our C90s. She said "Scheiße" a lot as the card machine wasn't working properly. Mr M was fascinated... She shared her LinkedIn with us. We wrote to her when we got to Berlin, but she never replied back to this day.
Enough about Yana. We decided to go see the city center before starting our journey to Berlin.
PS: All the men in that station were fascinated by our story and choice of bikes for the trip.
I got the Rathaus on the map:
And we parked at the bicycle park again:
Not as sunny as street view.
And not as upright as street view:
From there, we went back to the bikes and made our way to St. Nikolai Memorial:
Again, at the bicycle parkplatz...
Here is a street view reference:
And since I'm always fascinated with the past and history, I went around the walls of this destroyed church and pictured all the bullet holes from the war:
We left from St. Nikolai Memorial with Berlin on our SatNavs (phones).
This is how it looked like when we loaded the route up:
I don't remember much from that trip other than going in straight lines for long periods of time. We went through this town where the trees looked amazing. I took some in-flight photos:
All inverted, sadly. But... I did manage to find the place on maps:
So let's try doing this on street view. Let me know how I did:
Tried to be as close as I could to the pictures I took. It's sad that the pictures are inverted. Pretty scenery. I will find a better image hosting website and turn these the right way round... sadly, I did spend some time on Google while IMGBOX was down, and all the other sites were showing these pictures inverted as well.
As we were approaching Berlin, we started seeing these milestones that looked pretty weird. I didn't take any pictures, but I'll try to find them on the street view.
This is not the one I saw, but I guess that's what they meant:
I kept searching for one and couldn't find it. It's hard to do it on maps, and if there's one every km with some missing, it takes ages.
We arrived in Berlin via Spandau, and I instantly remembered something. I asked Mr M if he knew what happened in Spandau after WWII, and he didn't. I told him that the Spandau prison was where the higher-ranked Nazis were imprisoned after the Nuremberg Trials. I told him that Rudolf Hess was the last prisoner in Spandau. After his flight to Scotland in 1941, he was brought back to the Trials in Nurenberg and sentenced to life in prison. Unlike all the other high-ranked people from the 3rd Reich, including Albert Speer, Karl Doenitz, etc, who were released early, Rudolf was kept in Spandau till his death. I also told him that around 2015, the WWII archives were opened to the public, but Hess's file is still a secret to this day. The 4 Allied powers took rotation when guarding Hess. He wasn't allowed to read the papers as they were, and they censored some information from him. He wasn't allowed to talk to the public either. He was the last prisoner in Spandau for quite some time till his death in the late '80s, after which the Spandau Prison was knocked to the ground. Many say that his attempt to pursue the English Royal Family must have been the reason why so many guarded him for so long. It's like they guarded a secret, not a person.
On that note, we started seeing the communist influence in the outskirts of Berlin. We even said, both of us, that it looks so much like Bucharest. We felt like we entered Bucharest.
It was dark, and we were tired... but still... a lot of resemblances.
We decided to stop for food and saw the Old Spandau area with the church and all from the main street. We made a right turn at the first junction and ended up in a pedestrian area only. We got off the bikes and pushed them till we found a place to eat. It was a Balkan restaurant, which was great...
Another street view representation. We parked the C90s next to the restaurant on that narrow alleyway towards the Church:
It was dark, unlike this image, and the waiter was Serbian and lived in Romania for a while. He liked that time of his life, he said. He also said that the kitchen would close soon, so we better hurry and order something. I had some chicken while Mr M had a schnitzel.
We ate, warmed up, and decided to go see Berlin during the night before going to the hotel.
I'll show you Berlin during the night in the next episode.