Day 167: Road Trip to Berlin

We woke up later than we anticipated. I don't think the alarm went off like it was supposed to! But we got ourselves in gear, packed up the car and headed north to Berlin. For the first two hundred kilometers the trip went as planned.

We stopped at a truck stop to have lunch. Normally I wouldn't do that but this truck stop, called Servway, was exceptional. It was very clean, family friendly and had a cafeteria style restaurant. It was a little on the pricey side but it was definitely wonderful. They also had Burger King and many Germans were in line for that. It's either because it was inexpensive or because they don't get the opportunity to splurge on fast food on a regular basis.

We got back in the car and were on our way. But we knew we might have some trouble because we would be so far north and knew that very few people would speak English. So we opted to stay at a Courtyard Marriott outside of Berlin for several reasons: 1) it's an international hotel so most likely they speak English, 2) our guide books recommended that we not try to drive in the city due to the massive reconstruction that's going on there since the wall fell and 3) our hotel was near public transportation. What more could we want. Plus the restaurant had ample parking for our car. Always a consideration when traveling to big cities in Germany.

About 160 Km from Berlin Julie started acting weird and was trying to take us to an alternate location. We decided to turnaround and go back to Autobahn 9 and continue on to Berlin.

Ted was getting low on fuel but we wanted to stop at the ESSO station to use our monthly alottment of gasoline. But the nearest station was about 90 km away. There was another one 30 km away and we wanted to stop at that one. But according to the map, it looked like it was right on the autobahn but we passed that exit. We were sweating it. The low on gas light did not light up but just to be on the safe side, we stopped and put 10 Euro (about $15 - a little over 2 gallon) in the tank, just to get us to the next ESSO station...which it turns out, was about 3km from where we were. Well, we would rather be safe than sorry! In Germany, if you run out gas on the autobahn, you get fined and we didn't want that.

We arrived at our hotel at around 7pm and checked in. The clerk gave us the brochure for the hop on / hop off tour bus that we would be taking and explained that the bus to get to the train to get downtown was a mere 50 meters from the hotel. Hooray, not too much walking to get to the bus stop!

We went to our room and got situated then went downstairs and had dinner. While waiting for dinner, I perused the Hop on / Hop off brochure with all of its stops and circled the ones I thought we both would be interested in. Ted will have to confirm this and then we'll need to figure out how much time we can spend at each location.

We both had a small caesar salad and shared a bowl of potato soup but it was more like potato and mushroom soup. I loved it but Ted was disappointed. However, it was THE best caesar salad I've ever had and even Ted liked it and he is not big on caesar salads!

We stayed and talked to the waitress who, it turns out, spent a year in Virginia Beach as an exchange student. We talked about the differences in the languages and how hard it is to learn a new language. We enjoyed her company immensely!!

We went back upstairs to check email but could not get a a connection. I was so tired form the trip, I went immediately to sleep.

Saturday 09/05/09