While Denmark and Germany have a land border, the fastest way from Berlin to Copenhagen involves crossing thirty or so miles of the Baltic Sea in a ferry boat. We’re used to ferries in Washington State, but these are more like ships. The process is about the same. You wait in a long line at the port, eventually drive on to the ferry/ship, park your car, leave it to go upstairs and spend money while you cross the water. We had lunch and played Farkle, thus taking our game international. We are each 1-1 on the high seas.

Notice, they get USA Today in Germany.

We nearly missed the boat because it’s so freaking hard to drive in Berlin. They must have their own Mayor McSchwinn. Traffic lights are very short. Busses and bicycles have more lanes than cars. They have traffic lights in the middle of some blocks; no side street, no pedestrian crossing, just a traffic light for the main road.

Fortunately the road eventually opened up and we had a number of unlimited speed zones to use to make up time. Plus a 13:00 departure means you get on the boat around 13:10 or so. Whew. BTW, the car has great brakes!

Our hotel ‘apartment’ has a kitchen including a fridge and an oven. We went to the grocery store and bought the ingredients for home-made, gluten-free pizza.

Groceries are really expensive here. Two small bags ran us 265 Danish krone, about $50 or so. But it was nice to eat in while traveling. It’s all relative anyway; breakfast in Berlin was $45 each.

Tomorrow we need to figure out how buy gas in Denmark and then maybe take a day trip into the countryside.

 

Yeah, that’s right. When you get to the most famous gate in the Berlin Wall, you see yet another iPad 2 ad.

Growing up in the Sixties, you sort-of assumed the Berlin Wall went up at the end of WW II. But that’s not true. It went up in 1961. There were several, about 11 I think, checkpoints along the wall where people could pass between East and West Berlin. The most famous of all is Checkpoint Charlie where Friedrichstrasse (our hotel is on this street) meets Zimmerstrasse. Checkpoint Charlie got its name because the West labeled the crossings with letters; and in military-talk, C is for Charlie. So yes, there were checkpoints Alpha, Bravo, Delta, etc.

The Wall was opened in 1989 and the two Germanys unified in 1990. When the Wall came down, so did the checkpoints. Now Checkpoint Charlie is a place marked by some signs, a museum and an outdoor exhibit that tells the story of the Wall and of Checkpoint Charlie. See the phone to above. And yes, a giant Apple ad.

The Wall itself is gone. You find pieces of it all over the city. Here is one from the front of our hotel:

Young people from the West painted the Wall with all sorts of graffiti. On the East, the population was kept from the wall by a “death strip”. I’m guessing there was not a lot of graffiti on that side.

Now if you go to locations where the Wall was, you find a cobblestone marker that follows the route of the wall, occasionally punctuated by plaques like this one:

Lastly, here is the famous sign over Checkpoint Charlie:

Our goal today was to see Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate. We did both, covering about 3.5 miles during three separate excursions between rain storms. (Not bad for a guy with a torn Achilles tendon!) When we were in Germany last it was cold and rainy. This time it is hot and rainy. Big improvement… I think.

Tomorrow, back in the car and off to a new country!

Ok, that was more than one word. Today we got the car. Or as they say here, we collected it. It’s a really fun, if not drawn out experience. The factory, or as they say Porsche Werk Leipzig, is dominated by a structure they call the ‘Diamond’. Apparently the neighbors call it the Porsche UFO.

The sort-of ice cream cone structure is the customer center. Off to the right is the factory; off to the left is a race track. Behind the race track is a combination off-road test course and animal preserve. Anyway, the day went something like this:

• Arrive as instructed at 8am. (BTW, the Leipzig Marriott is great!)
• Learn that the day begins at 8:45am. Doh!
• Sip coffee for forty-five minutes.
• Meet our host/guide for the early part of the day. We never really got his name, but he was nice enough.
• Tear around the race course in a car similar to ours while what’s-his-name explains lots of features of the car. I liked this part; she did not.
• Actually drive the car and tear around with what’s-his-name giving tips about the track and the fast line around.
• Switch back to the passenger side while what’s-his-name takes us around the off-road course. The car can do some amazing things including climb forty-five degree angles, descend (without driver input) the same hill, drive forty-five degrees tilted to the side, wade through about thirty inches of water and a whole bunch of stuff we NEVER do.
• See our actual car. Each customer has his/her own, hmmm, delivery room? No, that’s not quite the right term. Your car has its own carpeted bay with a few side chairs for doing the paper work. What’s-his-name went over more features of the car, we loaded our luggage into it and signed the papers. We’d paid in the US so we only had to pay for additional insurance.
• Learn we can’t use the navigation system in Europe. It’s US only and can’t be changed to Europe without having ordered that a few weeks in advance. Who knew? So they gave us a little Garmin-like thing to use while we’re here. Ugh.
• What’s-his-name hands us off to Lars for the factory (Werk) tour. In Stuttgart the factory tour was a group thing. In Leipzig we had Lars all to ourselves. And it was great. The factory is super-modern. Everything happens ‘just-in-time’ and very precisely. The parameters of our car, or any other, are shared among many manufacturers in several countries. The engine came from Hungary. Most of the car was made in Slovakia. Other features were added and final assembly happened in Leipzig. Somehow, through the miracle of information technology, it all comes together and you get a car.
• See some cars we don’t get in the US (diesels) and some we don’t yet get (Panamera hybrid.) The tour went about an hour and Lars answered every question we had and threw in all sorts of items we would not have thought to ask.
• Lars escorts us through the museum and then to the restaurant for our (free) three-course lunch. It was good and also relaxing.
• Finally, get in the car and almost drive off. We could not get the iPod interface to work. Lars tried to help but in the end we found it won’t work with our iPod but will work with our iPad. That’s a little clunky, but at least we have music.

From the Porsche factory we drove to Berlin. It’s 178 kilometers, or 111 miles. We only hit 200 km/h once. Or twice. Or… Anyway, the car is rock steady at that speed, around 125 mph. The car has a lot of power, but it doesn’t pull with that we-have-to-haul-ass-NOW urgency that the 911 has. Not that we expected it to. But is really is fun to drive. We’ll try to find a faster road while we still have some Autobahn left. Speeds in the other countries we are visiting are usually much lower.

Berlin is (I believe) Germany’s largest city. We didn’t see too much today as we arrived around 5pm. We’ll spend the day tomorrow walking around. They do have a piece of the Berlin Wall outside the hotel. We’ll take some Berlin photos tomorrow for the blog and for Smugmug.

OK, that’s a fairly obscure reference. It refers to the Mitch Hedberg routine where he tries to get some bread for a duck at a Subway sandwich shop. They try to charge him until they find out the bread is for a duck. Apparently they have free bread for ducks. Look the routine up, it’s funny.

So Day 2 was all about getting to Leipzig, which we have done. It was a long flight, but without problems. Just long. The schedule is almost evil. You lose nine hours on the way over. But because the flight leaves at 2pm Pacific Time and takes ten hours, the nine hours you lose include all of the hours you would normally sleep. So we’re dead on our feet.

We tried to find a gluten-free (gluten-frei in German) dinner options but struck out until we saw the Subway sandwich shop at the train station. You can always get the contents of any of their subs as a salad instead of a sandwich. But… Germany is having a big e-coli scare right now and you’re not supposed to eat lettuce, tomatoes or cucumbers. And maybe not sprouts. They aren’t sure.

So we asked for a tuna salad sub as a salad, but with no lettuce, no tomatoes, etc. They discussed it among themselves and for some reason decided they could not do it. We eventually talked them into it, but it all could have been simpler if we had just said… it was for a duck.

This picture is from Day 1, but the two seem like one to us. It shows how much room you get in business class.

They advertise a 2m bed. I’m 6’ plus a little, but I somehow am longer than their 2m bed. iPads really rock for this kind of travel!

Here we go again! We have about 18 hours of travel door-to-door. Ten hours on one flight, one hour on a second flight, a four hour layover and assorted time to get to our airport and then finally to get to our hotel. It will be about 3pm local time when we get there or about 6am (tomorrow) in Seattle.

More to follow…

 

* More song references may or may not follow.  This one is a song reference and a movie reference.