On the road to Berlin.

We pack all of our ever expanding collection of stuff back into the car and drive until we get to a truck stop. Deciding to get some breakfast, we head across the car park and into a similar but not as good food hall as the one we ate in two nights ago. Willy has some delicious BK and I have a giant pretzel with my coffee. Willy also has coffee, but that should go without saying.

Most of today we drive, or rather Willy drives. He does an amazing job on the autobahn and we get up to almost 200km's at one stage. We drive through picture book villages, through rows of solar panels, through patches of all sorts of vegetables, the odd (very few) herd/flock of animals (they don't farm like we do at home), and through a heap of wind turbines. During the Southern end of our trip everything is very precise and picture book perfect. The same cannot be said for the landscape as we draw nearer to Berlin. Gradually the little towns look slightly newer, less well maintained, and not as charming. The gardens become overgrown, there's more rubbish, more graffiti, and more boarded up buildings. It's a lot like our introduction to Rome.

There was no accomodation that we could afford in Berlin that night so we end up in a town in the outskirts called Zossen. We pull up at our hotel, directly opposite there is a large stone building that was boarded up and through it's windows we can see trees growing towards where the roof once was. During our post check in walk we discover that there is literally nothing of note in our surrounding area, not even anything for dinner or a pub. The only thing to do in Zossen is get out of Zossen. We are so stoked to have a car.

We drive up the road (a long way) to the mall. The pet shop is super cool. There are tortoises, large turtles, hamsters, snakes, spiders, lizards, and more. I love it until I see the containers of live crickets. Um no. No thank you. There is no cold beer in the supermarket, so we drive to the other supermarket and liquor store that we saw on our way to the mall. Having decided to have dinner in our room, we amass armfuls of delicious treats in the supermarket, including meats, cheeses, rolls, and salad - yum! Then we try to buy cold beer from the liquor shop. There is a walk in fridge the size of a toilet cubicle under lock and key with the tiniest amount and selection of beer you've ever seen. It's really fascinating because in NZ if you can buy beer, you can buy cold beer, and no liquor store would be without an industrial size fridge with a mountain of beer inside. It's not the same here at all, we wonder if it's to curb drink driving/drinking in public/alcoholism.

The rest of the evening is spent eating and drinking in our hotel room. We are such party animals.