Cologne

So we waved good bye to Sehnde and headed towards Cologne. We decided to stop in Essen on the way at Zollverein which was once the largest coal mine in Europe. The enormous site is now a series of museums,

View from the top and inside the coal washing building. Nick didn't make it up here!

studios for artists and performance spaces, cafés and play areas - all still with the buildings intact and various trucks etc left seemingly where they were last used.

We spent a couple of hours there but could have honestly spent the whole day I think as we only explored a tiny part of it. Definitely recommended.

Friday was our only full day here in Cologne so we first went to the iconic Kölner Dom ( Cologne cathedral).

It's Germany's largest cathedral and the scale of it is something incredibly impressive - all very gothic and stained glass windows although there is one new stained glass window made of 11500 squares which we all liked. We then took a little wander around the city centre both old and new and after lunch in a large sunny square we decided to have a ride on the Bimmelbahn (one of those little road train things).

We spent most of it trying to stop Reuben climbing everywhere but by the end realized that we'd seen most of the sights during our wanderings in the morning. The afternoon was finished with a trip to the Chocolate Museum - could there be any better way to finish the day?!?

Trying to get into the machine with the liquid chocolate

Oh yes - by sampling chocolate cake in the museum cafe.

We had a few hours on Saturday morning and so visited the Deutsches Sport museum which was conveniently near to our hotel. Although not massive, there  was plenty to see and try out and it finished with a game of football on the roof with another boy. The international language of football :)

We now head into the Rhine Valley for our week on a farm with an expected lack of internet so will update next weekend when we get to Stuttgart. 

Hanover

Well a small town called Sehnde really.

So we arrived back in Germany as planned although very late - after midnight by the time we got to our hotel. Our original flights landed at a civilized hour but unfortunately the airline changed the time and so we weren't due to arrive back til 10.30pm but actually landed after 11pm. Way too late with kids. Zach was really good but very tired. Reuben slept on the plane and seemed to think that he was done for the night so I was wandering around the hotel lobby after 2am trying to get him to sleep. Finally made it to bed around 3am so needless to say we were all some way from our best on Monday morning. 

We headed back to the airport to see if our laptop had been returned. It hasn't yet but the guy who has it was due back on Tuesday so we are now very hopeful of seeing it again. 

We drove down to Sehnde - a small town around 20 minutes from Hanover where we will stay for the next 3 nights. We stopped on the way in Celle, a town with beautiful old half timbered buildings.

There was a lovely schloss which we would like to have looked around, but being Monday, of course everything is closed. We had a wander around, some lunch, an icecream and then headed to our new destination - a lovely little 2 bedroom apartment in a quiet suburb. Perfect. 

Making the fountains work with our feet

Tuesday was a big day for the boys. A trip to Autostadt in Wolfsburg around an hour away. It is the car collection centre and factory for Volkswagen but is now a huge centre with pavilions for VW, Porsche, Seat, Audi, etc (I can't remember them all - my car memory is limited to silver, red, blue...). A little slice of heaven for a car mad boy and his Dad.

Zach on the energy swing in the VW pavilion - he made enough energy to take a photo of himself

The Porsche pavilion on the right and the car towers on the left

Outside the Porsche pavilion

Two excited boys - probably the only time they'll get to sit in a Porsche!

In the Skoda pavilion

Trying an Audi out

Reuben in the Audi pavilion - the Audi spheres were used to access the interactive displays

Zach at driving school

Giant make-your-own icecream with whatever toppings you wanted

The littlest munchkin in the huge indoor play area

Easy for this boy to smile at the end of the day - the best day of his life, apparently!

Wednesday - the laptop had been handed in at Hamburg airport so we decided that Nick and Zach would get the train up and back today while Reuben and I explored Hanover. Reuben and I waved the two bigger boys off at Hanover Hauptbahnhof and then headed to tourist information outside. We decided to follow the 'Red Thread' around the city to see the sights. There is a painted red line and arrows (Roter Faden) which leads you around the sights of the city. 

Reuben and I setting out on our tour

Up to 80% of central Hanover was destroyed in airraids in 1943 but there are some restored parts as well as new and some which escaped bombing. Our tour took most of the morning including a stop for iced coffee as it was shaping up to be another hot day. 

After lunch, Reuben decided that the fountain looked too good to miss out on and so headed in. There seem to be pavement fountains (for want of a better phrase) in every town/city we visit and for a water-loving baby they are hard to resist. 

Meanwhile, the biggest boys had retrieved the laptop - woohoo - although there was a €20 service charge from the lost and found office. Ah well, even train tickets and a service charge are a lot cheaper than a new laptop. A change of clothes and Reuben and I hit the shops in the afternoon and then waited for the big boys at the station waving British flags. I think everyone thought we'd gone mad :)

Onwards tomorrow: Cologne. 

Back to Germany

We're heading back to Germany this afternoon to continue our German holiday. We've had a great week canal-ing with the family and have, as ever, resolved to one day buy a narrowboat of our own.

Hoping to be reunited with our laptop at Hamburg airport but not really expecting to.

Next stop: Hannover. 

A pause....

So now our Germany holiday breaks for a week and we've headed to England for our three-yearly Upton family canal boat trip.

We drove to Hamburg airport and left the car there and we'll be picking it up in a week to head onwards to Hannover and further south. 

Unfortunately while going through security at the airport we somehow managed to switch laptops with someone else (one MacBook looks pretty much exactly like another after all). We handed the one that isn't ours to the police and are hoping that the person who has ours will do the same and that we can pick it up when we arrive back next weekend. Unless he's gone on a round the world trip for a year....... Fingers crossed. 

Berlin

This has always been a 'want to visit' for Nick and I but we'd never got round to it, so when we started planning the Germany trip, Berlin was top of our list.
We arrived on Saturday afternoon - we're staying in an apartment on the 3rd floor of a fairly typical block with a small hof inside. No lift, unfortunately, so it was quite some work (for Nick!) to bring all our stuff up but at least we only had to do it once. The apartment would be lovely for just the two of us (lots of white, glass vases etc) but with two boys (one of whom is very adventurous - guess which?!?) there was a quick run around by me to move/hide all the glassware and hope I could remember where to put it back when we leave.
We decided to head out on Saturday afternoon for a couple of hours and went to the Tiergarten, a huge urban park for a wander around. Zach was very taken with the Siegessäule (Victory column) which he wants to go back to for a climb to the top. We headed round the paths, past naked sunbathing men (it was quite warm!) to the Neuer See where we

 

stopped for pizza near the lake and a huge screen for watching the football (Argentina Belgium I think) but decided to head back to the apartment to watch the rest of it as everyone was tired and ready for bed (well Nick and I were anyway).
Sunday was all about the wall. A brief 6-year old version of the Cold War and the Berlin Wall was explained at breakfast. Of course, with Zach no explanation is ever accepted without 3425632 questions so we spent the rest of the morning answering as many of them as we could. We headed straight for Brandenberger Tor in the morning and the Reichstag.

We had been hoping to visit the Reichstag dome, obviously, but apart from Sunday which was fully booked, the dome is closed for cleaning for the rest of the week. It just means that we'll have to come back for a second visit :) We then walked past the Holocaust Memorial to Potsdamer Platz along the line of the wall. There are a few places along the way with photos and explanations and we stopped to look at several. There are a few sections of wall in Potsdamer Platz which we saw and read about and then we headed to see just down the street to see one of the few remaining watch towers. Our next stop was the long (200m roughly) section of wall near to Checkpoint Charlie but it was getting very hot (over 30 degrees today) and Reuben was ready for a run around so we headed back to Potsdamer Platz for some lunch. We'll go back later in the week to see that section of wall and Checkpoint Charlie.
We had intended to go to the old Tempelhof airport in the afternoon but it was so hot we decided that Mauerpark might have more shade instead. The park has a section of wall running through it and is full of people, street artists, a flea market and all kinds of entertainment everywhere. It was hot and busy but we enjoyed it.

Although we were fairly close to our apartment district, public transport was tricky and so it involved 4 different 1-2 stop train rides to get back.
Some advice: apparently suncream leaves orange marks on white painted wooden floors. Who knew? So while I scrubbed floors with the ever-useful baby wipes, Nick bathed two very dirty boys.

Monday - the weather was forecast to be good for most of the day and as it seemed to be getting worse as the week went on, we decided to spend the day at the zoo. Zach decides to announce that he doesn't really like zoos (since when???), but tough luck, we're heading there anyway. It seemed like there were tons of school trips there as well but there was so much space that it never seemed really crowded. We started with watching the polar bears being fed and then wandered our way around until we found a fabulous playground which Zach absolutely loved (Reuben slept through this part). More wandering followed by lunch and then rather longer spent in the monkey house than planned as the heavens opened and although we had the rain cover for the pram, the rest of us were not dressed for a rainstorm. After half an hour or so, Nick had had a short nap (not a good night with Reuben on Sunday night, so many yawns all round) and the rain had lessened to slight drizzle so we headed back out for more animals, ice-cream and more playground fun. The bathwater was decidedly brown this evening......and apparently, zoos are quite fun after all.

Roo with the roos

Tuesday - after heavy rain all night, we didn't have great hopes for today but by the time we got organised (we were a bit slow after a very early start from Reuben) the rain had at least stopped. We had a quick change around in plans as we didn't want to 'waste' an inside item while we were rain-free. So as promised earlier in the week, we decided to head to Checkpoint Charlie and a longer section of the wall nearby. There was an interesting exhibition about the wall and some people who tried to cross it near to Checkpoint Charlie but the actual place felt a little underwhelming.

Having said that, I wouldn't want to have come to Berlin and not have seen it. We then headed to a longer section of wall nearby and then down to the East Side Gallery - a long section of wall near to the river which has had murals painted along it.

After a stop for lunch in a 'beach bar' near to the river and the East Side Gallery, we took advantage of the continuing lack of rain and decided to head to the old Tempelhof airport, famous particularly for the Berlin airlift. No longer a working airport, it has been left undeveloped as a huge open park space. After pretending to be planes on the runway and running up and down, Nick and Zach hired a chopper tricycle type thing and headed away down another runway to explore some more.

We would have loved to visit the old terminal building too but unfortunately, you can only do that on a tour at weekends. Thunder started to ominously rumble so we headed for the U-Bahn and to Alexanderplatz. We saw the iconic Fernsehturm (TV tower) but as neither Nick nor I particularly like heights we decided not to spend 40 euros scaring ourselves witless by going over 200m up in the air. The rain decided to come now, so we headed into the nearby huge shopping centre, found some world cup stickers (hurrah said Zach) and then headed back. Rain forecast for our next two days here.

Wednesday - plenty of rain overnight and a lot forecast for the afternoon so we indulged Zach and headed back to the Siegessäule as he'd been asking every day since we first saw it on Saturday afternoon if he could go to the top. Nick and Zach headed to the top (564 stairs apparently) while Reuben and I hung out at the bottom and tried to spot them. Zach loved it, Nick didn't but then if you don't like heights then you probably wouldn't. Nick managed to randomly point the camera in a few places while chivvying Zach along to get back down.

We stopped in a playground in the Tiergarten afterwards but most things were very wet. The park keeper explained something about terrible storms this afternoon at 2pm and we headed off to lunch. Noodles were the order of the day - we needed something different.

Bearing in mind the parkie's warning we decided on the Deutsches Technik Museum for the afternoon. While certainly not the best technical/science museum we've been to (and let's face it we've been to a few in the last 6 years), it was pretty good for €9.50 for the 4 of us. A cake stop in the cafe and we headed back, unfortunately not before the much-predicted heavy rain. People reckon the English like to talk about the weather but I reckon the Germans could give them quite a bit of competition. 

Thursday - we decided to make today all about the boys as Zach had fairly good-heartedly seen a lot of things that probably weren't that exciting for a 6 year old. We first went back to Tempelhof as Zach really wanted to hire his own gokart and not share a ride with Nick.

It was a lovely sunny day and they rode around while Reuben looked at flowers and ran up and down the runway.

Next we were off to the Lego discovery centre. About as much fun as a 6 year old can have and the 1 year old enjoyed it too. Racing a Lego car that he built was a favourite I think and the 4D movie too.

Pizza for dinner afterwards and two very tired but happy boys. 

So goodbye to Berlin. There is so much more that we want to see and do here that I'm sure we'll be back one day. 

Stralsund

So on we went on our merry little way - further east until we got to our next destination: a small village about 10km outside Stralsund. Another really idyllic location, surrounded by fields down a cobbled lane. We appeared to be staying in a shed in someone's (rather large) garden but as sheds go, it was very very nice.












After a quick supermarket trip, we decided to spend the rest of the afternoon enjoying the garden, playing football, picking daisies and drinking beer - no prizes for guessing who was doing what!

 We headed into Stralsund for the day on Thursday. Some wandering around the UNESCO recognised old town in the morning followed by lunch overlooking the harbour while Reuben napped.

In the afternoon we visited the Ozeaneum - a museum about the seas and oceans and including some aquariums as well. Very much enjoyed by all of us, especially the boys and the little fish-mad one. He hasn't quite worked out which animal is which as he was trying out his dog and cat noises at the fish.

An ice-cream to finish the day - very enjoyable. Unfortunately for me, it turns out that Reuben quite likes ice-cream, so I ended up sharing mine.

Friday was forecast to be warm and sunny so we drove over to the island of Rügen. When we first started planning our Germany trip, there were a few things that we had as 'must-do' or 'must-see'. Hiring a Strandkorb on one of the Baltic beaches was one of them and we hadn't bothered in Sierksdorf as the weather was mostly so rubbish, so here was our last chance. We headed to Binz - the beach was large and the sand was beautiful and powdery soft.



Once installed in our basket, we spent the day doing beachy kinds of things - playing in the sea, playing with the sand, eating sandy sandwiches, football and frisbee.

Absolutely what we hoped for and got us talking about how and when we could return. Not just yet though as Berlin beckons tomorrow.