Trip miles 728
-5 overnight
Overnight had brought a thick blanket of snow and the
soft heavy flakes continued to fall as Bertha’s gas heater brought welcome
warmth and we watched the boatmen valiantly attempt to sweep clean their boats
which were clearly booked for Good Friday lunchtime river cruising. It was a
bank holiday, it had been snowing hard, but this is Germany and the gritters
and snowploughs had been out to clear the roads.
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| Bertha alongside the Elbe |
We had a remarkably easy journey along the autobahn admiring
the snow-capped tall pines and stark skeletal larch trees whose every branch
had been lined in the magical white powder. We headed to Berlin in light
traffic, most of which was driving fast into the blizzard and registered to
Poland. We were caught up in the great Easter exodus to the East as West
European Poles and Czech workers returned home to spend the holiday with their
families.
The Berlin ring road on the opposite side was a six lane
traffic jam as city dwellers attempted to head south. By noon we were pulling
into our campsite north of the inner city and close to Tegel airport. Then we
encountered Helga. Small and industrious she pushed us out of reception as we
attempted to book in. It was her lunch break. Miraculously the combination of
my schoolgirl German and probably the more effective waving of a bit of paper
confirming ‘aber wir haben ein reservierung’ caused her to show us reluctantly
to a site.
Meanwhile another arrival chose to reverse his huge
motorhome to his allocated pitch taking out three snowmen, two saplings and a
concrete pillar. His wife seemed to blame me for this as I stood in the drifts
waiting to call Simon and Bertha into our allotted space. Whilst the hapless
couple argued we plugged Bertha into the last available electrical socket and
set about leaving to visit the city.
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| Home for 4 nights at Berlin Tegel Wohnmobil Park |
The u-bahn from the campsite took 25 minutes to get into
the centre of Berlin at Friedrichstrasser. The biting wind and blizzarding snow
did not favour the massive construction works going along historic Unter den
Linden which is subject to a new underground connection being built to connect
Brandenburg Gate with the East side Alexander Platz.
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| Berliner Dom in Lustgarten |
Dodging the building sites we saw Lustgarten where Hitler
preached bitter ideology to thousands and were meantime jostled by hundreds of
like-minded Easter visitors being channelled by construction works through
temporary wooden corridors past Berlin’s massive Dom to find a cheap respite
and coffee in Mcdonalds – zeitgeist of the West newly resident in a prime
location overlooking Alexander Platz.
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| Tramways and fernsehturm |
First impressions of East side ‘Alex’ were of construction
works, trams, high tower blocks, overhead railways, advertising hoarding and
the cold. We circled the Fernsehturm – Berlin’s
iconic skyline monument to television under which a cheery Easter markt was
setting up stalls in the falling snow.
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| Alexander Platz |
Needing basic food supplies we found the only open supermarkt
back at Friedrichstrasse helpfully on the way home but packed with hundreds of
people also attempting to stock up for the weekend. We queued a long time at
the checkouts and loaded identical goods to around us stocking up on beer,
wine, bread and chocolate. Outside the queue to enter the store easily numbered
a hundred and a security guard let two in as two left. A taste of old East
Berlin.
The train delivered us back in darkness to a snowy walk
back to the campsite passing the candles newly lit in the pets’ cemetery. The
first hot shower of the trip delivered four magical minutes of scorching hot
water and scalded clean we enjoyed a Berliner Kindl beer and shared our first
impressions as the snow continued to fall…
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| Precarious walk home with the milch |
