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Germany (and surrounds) (20 August - 5 September 2010)

Road trips! Since arriving in the UK some four years ago I've done Florida, New York to Washington D.C., Banff to Vancouver, southern France, and I guess you could include the little mini one into Poland from Berlin. Yup, who doesn't love a good road trip (unless you're susceptible to car sickness I guess), and this was the largest to date that I'd planned in terms of distance, countries, and time. Originally this was to be an entirely different trip - a completely unplanned week of just drifting along the Danube River (starting somewhere in Germany) and seeing where we ended up each day, nice! However, after several folk initially expressed interest in the idea, they later expressed disinterest instead - people are impossible to organise aren't they! So my plan of a random week of kicking back along some river in Germany instead became a plan between Katie and I of 16 days, 3500kms, and 9 countries with a focus on Germany and all on road - fuck yeah! Our planned route and itinerary are below...

We also decided to make this another camping trip like the southern France road trip, and just for fun Katie suggested we get some more folk on board - the more the merrier and all that. So we started asking around, and true to form people are impossible and couldn't/wouldn't commit and we got nowhere. Katie then came up with a last-minute suggestion of inviting Kristina (my Texan mate who I met in Santorini last year while there with my mother and brother). Considering Kristina lives in Texas (yeehaw!) it was something of a long shot to say the least hehe, but to my surprise she was all for it (minus the initial apprehension over gate crashing someone else's trip). Kristina had set about making a few plans of her own around another four-month gallivant through Europe (similar to what she was doing a year ago when we met) and tied this trip into it. So there you go, nice to know there is at least one person in the world with whom trying to organising something isn't like trying to lick your own elbow.

Kristina (left) flew into dirty old London on the Wednesday morning, and we all flew out on the Friday night to Hamburg.		Nice to know the sun is actually up there above the persistent British cloud.		And this was our weapon (though not of choice) for the trip - a Mercedes B-Class, a.k.a. the Gutless Wonder! This thing had as about much grunt as 20-year-old lawn mower, but that's what you get when you go for the cheapest hire car company. They don't even bother fitting wheel trims to the wheels hahaha! Anyway, we landed in Hamburg, collected the car, and drove straight to...

Schwerin (or “Swearing” as I called it because Kristina couldn't remember the name of it, but hey that's Americans for ya ;) It was almost midnight by the time we arrived and we were friggin' hungry, so we dumped our stuff in the hostel and immediately set out in search of food. We had to stop by the castle for a few night shots first of course, one of many we were to find on this trip. Wikipedia describes Schwerin Castle as “a castle located in the city of Schwerin” - perfect. There has been a castle on this site in one form or another since the 10th century. During that time they served as the home to dukes and grand dukes of the area, and nowadays it serves as the seat of the state parliament and something for the tourists to take photos of.

As we started wandering through Swearing with tummies rumbling amid a nice mix of 16th- to 19th-century architecture, it quickly became apparent we should have eaten back at the airport hehe - the place was dead, despite being a Friday night!

Swearing is home to 100,000 and we finally found some of them outside an open bar, that stopped serving food hours ago and could only offer us peanuts. We kept that in mind but continued our hunt. Round the corner we found a pair of drunk and bored kids who took an immediate shine to Kristina hehe, and despite speaking very little English were keen to take us to where they thought we could find some chow. Well, they were wrong, everything was closed. But, by some miracle, on our way back to the bar for some of those peanuts, we just happened upon a half-closed Chinese fast food joint who were kind enough to relight the burners and throw us something together. The randomness of it all wasn't lost on us, but we really didn't care - those were the best noodles I've ever had!

Some interesting artwork in our hostel. I'm not sure what I find so appealing about it, but there's definitely something ;)		So, our first full day of the trip, and we set out into the streets of Swearing again to see it by day. There were far more people around now.

I'm not sure what the deal was with the balloons there, but anyway Schwerin is a really nice wee city. It sits on the shore of a lake, there are lots of quiet little cobbled back streets to meander through, lots of trees, the weather was pushing 30 degrees, 'twas good!

Some of these buildings aren't looking too right though. It's a bit hard to make out in the photos but they're leaning in different directions - some over the road, some away from it, and the one on the right there looks like it's sinking into the ground. Good stuff!

Couple other random shots about the town.

German beer - it's good stuff, and seeing as it was breakfast I had a banana beer, yummy! None of us could read the menu and so for much of this trip I just went for whatever looked the most random, and that's usually what I got too. This thing (which turned out to be a jacket potato) came wrapped in foil in the shape of a swan.

Swearing Castle by day. This one was built in the mid-1800s, and is the main tourist attraction of the town. You can pay to go in but when you've seen one you've seen them all.

And with that we hit the German motorways, and their speed ‘suggestions' that nobody adheres to. The Gutless Wonder was reluctant to go over 180km/h on the flat.

Some days you're the windscreen, some days you're the bug.		No shortage of these throughout the country.		A couple hours later we hit Potsdam, about 20km southwest of central Berlin (which we didn't bother visiting due to time constraints and I've just been there recently anyway).

Potsdam is to Berlin what Versailles is to Paris, and similar to Versailles there's a massive park (Sanssouci Park) and palaces and whatnot right in the thick of it all. However, there was some event going on in the park that meant we weren't allowed to enter, so the best we could do was admire postcards of it instead :(

We also wandered along the main pedestrian street, bought some ice cream, enquired in some outdoors store for a hammer seeing as we'd all forgotten to bring one on the trip to bang the tent pegs in, got told off in that store in German for eating ice cream in there, wandered around some more, and left.

Hers look fake to me.

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