Country 2: Germany

Germany was excellent- well all countries were that and Germany was no exception. The trip to Germany started rather early in the morning. We woke up at 0100 to catch the 0245 ferry to Sassnitz from Malmö. The ferry ride was long because there was no place to sleep- everyone else had taken the prime spots so we had to sit and wait. We pulled into port at around 0700 in the morning and promptly went to the border shop to stock up on alcohol. The prices were rather cheap at this shop, being around 60% of normal prices. On the way back into Sweden Micke stopped off again to stock up… and with myself not in the car there was a lot more room for beer.

Germany is filled with wild poppies and trees that are too close to the road and formed canopies overhead- they even had signs warning drivers of the dangers of these trees. Quite humorous!



We arrived in Berlin around lunch time of Friday, June 23. The drive was long and Micke became a little stressed with me because I wanted to do too much- on the way to Berlin we were driving by a concentration camp (Sachsenhausen) which I thought would be interesting to see, as well my friend Yvonne was going to be in Berlin that day as well and I wanted to have coffee with her- plus we had not found a place to sleep- too much for one day, especially the first. Well we skipped the camp, which was probably a good thing because I think it might be rather depressing, we had coffee with Yvonne and then proceeded to find a campsite.

This was rather challenging. The tourist office provided us with addresses of several different camp grounds- but we didn’t have a map that was specific enough so we drove to the subdivision and then drove around hoping to see signs- we did this for about 1.5hrs with no luck. Finally we stumbled on a park with the same name as one of the campsites- so we asked and were given directions and a map. The site was excellent- quite luxury in fact. It was situated in Potsdam which is a small area just outside of Berlin.

Berlin, by the way is huge! It took us between 45 min and an hour to drive from the center of the city to the outskirts. We did not spend anytime in Berlin, except for the coffee with Yvonne because it was crazy busy with the soccer tournament- so we decided to just keep going.



In Potsdam there was this fantastic park called Sanssouci Park. It had some fantastic buildings that were built for the monarchs. One building, called the Orangerie, was a greenhouse type facility to grow oranges for the king.


During dinner that night I had quite a surprise. I had set up the table and chairs so that they faced the water. While we were eating this man, I would guess he was around 60 years old, rode up to the waters edge on his bike, dismounted, removed all of his clothing and went for a swim- this was not exactly what I wanted to observe while eating dinner. So I took a picture.

The next day, after spending the morning exploring Sanssouci Park, headed off for Dresden. It as well had some nice architecture and I had a blast taking pictures.


Micke had a lesson in patience I think, because in several of the pictures I took of him, I could tell that, although he was enjoying the scenery, he was really just waiting for me.



I found Germany and its road communication rather frustrating. The map was very easy to follow- but finding those roads in reality was much more difficult, this meant it took us along time and a lot of backtracking to get to Praque.