Templin/Schwerin/Luebeck

Around eight we head to the downstairs restaurant for breakfast. In the last five weeks I have eaten a lot of complimentary hotel breakfasts, but I have never seen anything like this. There are about five two (or multi) sided buffet stations, a children's area, and (Yvonne and Dad will appreciate this) a huge waffle making station of about half a dozen waffle machines. It's totally mad. There are so many types of bread, fruit, cheese, meat, cereal, milk, juice, water, etcetera, etcetera, that it's super hard to decide what to eat! After breakfast we go for a walk to explore the grounds and end up on the private beach. There are lots of little mounds of dirt and we aren't sure what would make them. Willy hopes that they are made by gophers. Do they even have Gophers here?

We drive off at about ten and make our way to Schwerin to see the castle. It's super impressive from the outside. Apparently parliament uses the front of it, which seems a shame, so we head to the back, pay our money and go to see what we can see. The rooms that they have restored are stunningly beautiful, rich fabrics, heavenly wood, fantastic artwork... We stand in the library, wonderful wood paneling all around us, looking out over the lake... Yeah, what a terrible place to have to live. The next thing we know, we find ourselves at the end. It's very, very small - the part you can visit anyway. We walk around the grounds for a while, they are wonderful, I don't even like gardens that much and I can appreciate these, so they must be good.

During a bathroom break at a rest stop on the autobahn I go to grab a drink. It still cracks me up that you can buy beer (wine and rtd's) on the side of the autobahn and that it is literally cheaper for me to drink the beer than soda or water. How is this possible! It's the same at gas stations too. So bizarre!

Whenever we are on the road we have the radio on. There are so many stations playing music I know. It's like having Classic Hits! I swear that I can sing along to maybe one in three songs. Poor Willy. When it's in range I try to put on BBC World, it's the only channel that I have found where everything is in English. It's really interesting hearing the news from a different perspective - yes I know that I can do this at home, but I rarely listen to the radio normally and I don't clock up this much drive time in an average week. It's also nice to hear English! We haven't heard a huge amount since we left England and it's relaxing to be able to understand something easily for a while.

We continue on, and wind up at a wonderful little hotel in Luebeck. It's old, quaint, clean, and just feels good. Two minutes later we have dumped our bags and we hop back in the car to check out Old Town. Old Town is on an island in the middle of town. We park Heidi and walk over one of the foot bridges. There are gorgeous old boats moored in the canal (is it a canal? I don't know.) and we wander past them, down the cobbled street. It's a gorgeous town. After an hour or so of roaming, past churches, cute shops, and loads of red brick buildings, we stop for dinner. This is good as we are starting to get hangry at this point, breakfast was good but not enough to skip lunch. We eat at a Korean place while sitting in this gorgeous little German town. It seems a little wrong. The food is good though!