C90 Euro Trip 2023

[c70]

Great ride report, enjoyed the read! Where's next?

[George]

Sorry for taking this long for this next episode. IMGBOX wasn't working last week, and I didn't want to write up anything until it worked again.

There's also something else that I have omitted. On the way to Hamburg, I skipped quite a bit. Partially due to the lack of pictures, but also because I can't find the places we went to. Which is really sad as it's been quite interesting. So, I'll try to go over the events without any photographic/map support.

As mentioned, after we changed that lightbulb at the Jaeger Petrol Station, it was already dark. So finding the places we rode by is quite hard as all I could see was the road, and even that was not clear enough with our candle headlights. Squeezing my brain to remember what happened weeks ago doesn't help much, either. I do remember at some point, we got really tired, and I stopped taking pictures. The rain prevented me doing so as well.

But good news! As I was writing the paragraph above, I asked Mr M if we could find the address to where we attempted to sleep that night. So now I have map support!



So this is the short story.

The long story was that it was late, and we weren't anywhere near Hamburg. I do remember stopping for fuel. We filled up both Cubs at the same pump as usual, and as I was going into the station to pay, the lady was upset. We were her last customers, and we managed to lift the pump before stupid o'clock, which also coincided with her closing down and going home. She had a huff, and I asked if I could use the loo. She barked at me, saying that she closed a few minutes ago... obviously not as I was there and it wasn't closed... Anyways... paid for fuel, went into a bush, and continued riding. Mr M and I needed a warm and dry place to sit, munch on something, and look for a place to sleep. We stopped at the next petrol station, and there was this lovely lady (unlike the previous one) who was prepping to throw some nice-looking sandwiches in the bin. We asked if they were for sale, and she said no... they were for disposal, but that we could have one of our choice... or two. So we both picked two each and headed to a table in the corner. After eating both sandwiches like dogs, we politely asked if we could have more of them since she'd throw them away. Of course, it was a 15-minute conversation in total, as she couldn't speak any English, and my limited German wasn't great. We did end up asking for more for takeaway. We were so happy that we secured breakfast as well. We ended up throwing most of them away during the following two days. The bathroom was open as well. How important little things are in life... We looked on the map, and we found this place that Mr. M just shared the address of:



We booked online, and it was stated that they would close the reception at midnight. We made a dash for it, and we were late... by a few minutes. Here it is at daylight:



It was strange, looked much worse than it does in this picture, and, obviously, there wasn't anyone around. We were tired and desperate, so I went inside and hoped that one of the rooms would be open for us to crash for the night since we paid in advance. That wasn't the case, so we got out and went around the back of that house to check if there was anyone still up, the owner preferably, but our presence wasn't felt, so we left.

We found the B&B hotel and went for that:



We checked in at the hotel, which was great. It must have been 1 AM at that point. I'll continue in the next post reply.

[George]

We woke up the next day in Hamburg... a miracle in itself. I looked outside the window, which was facing southwest towards the train tracks, and it was pissing down. By the time we packed everything and got all the luggage in the lobby, the rain stopped. I took this picture:



The bikes were secured to that first bicycle loop throughout the night. At this point, I was sharing these incredible achievements with my family. Of course, they thought I would have time to go visit things in Hamburg... they had no clue how much time it was taking us to get places and how far we still had to go to honour the plan. My sister told me to go visit the miniature museum. My mom told me to go see the Oldtimer Petrol Station that she has as a miniature and wants to do as a diorama.

If you're interested in that, here is a picture of it... HO scale... I think that's 1:87:



(FALLER 130591 H0 Tankstelle Brandshof)

We didn't have time for any miniature museums, so we decided to go take a picture at this old petrol station:



Of course, I messed up these pictures. Or IMGBOX did... Apparently, they still make TuVs for classic cars at that place. They also have a cafe, so we decided to stop for tea/coffee and plan the next part of the trip:



You're lucky this image is the right way round... you can zoom in and admire Yana.

She served us tea/coffee and two Florentiner Apfelkuchen. That's the cakes we had. They also had cheesecake and the German Classic, Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte.

They had things in the other room... like car bits and a lot of bulbs. We had an attempt to find the headlight bulb for the C90 without any luck, of course. I did ask Yana if she had stickers with this place, and sadly, the ones they had were too big.

Okay... so she was amazed about our tour... she asked about the C90s and whatnot. We mentioned to her that we were heading to Berlin, and she said: "Out of all the beautiful places in Germany, you chose to go to Berlin?" We said we had never seen Berlin, and it was on our list.

Yeah yeah... you like Yana... fine... She went ahead and showed us her IFA Simson (on her phone). It was really cool and refurbed to a very high standard. She said she paid a lot to have it done that way. She asked about the C90s as she had never seen anything like it before. Of course, her Simson was faster than our C90s. She said "Scheiße" a lot as the card machine wasn't working properly. Mr M was fascinated... She shared her LinkedIn with us. We wrote to her when we got to Berlin, but she never replied back to this day.

Enough about Yana. We decided to go see the city center before starting our journey to Berlin.

PS: All the men in that station were fascinated by our story and choice of bikes for the trip.

I got the Rathaus on the map:



And we parked at the bicycle park again:



Not as sunny as street view.

And not as upright as street view:



From there, we went back to the bikes and made our way to St. Nikolai Memorial:



Again, at the bicycle parkplatz...



Here is a street view reference:



And since I'm always fascinated with the past and history, I went around the walls of this destroyed church and pictured all the bullet holes from the war:



We left from St. Nikolai Memorial with Berlin on our SatNavs (phones).

This is how it looked like when we loaded the route up:



I don't remember much from that trip other than going in straight lines for long periods of time. We went through this town where the trees looked amazing. I took some in-flight photos:



All inverted, sadly. But... I did manage to find the place on maps:





So let's try doing this on street view. Let me know how I did:



Tried to be as close as I could to the pictures I took. It's sad that the pictures are inverted. Pretty scenery. I will find a better image hosting website and turn these the right way round... sadly, I did spend some time on Google while IMGBOX was down, and all the other sites were showing these pictures inverted as well.

As we were approaching Berlin, we started seeing these milestones that looked pretty weird. I didn't take any pictures, but I'll try to find them on the street view.

This is not the one I saw, but I guess that's what they meant:



I kept searching for one and couldn't find it. It's hard to do it on maps, and if there's one every km with some missing, it takes ages.

We arrived in Berlin via Spandau, and I instantly remembered something. I asked Mr M if he knew what happened in Spandau after WWII, and he didn't. I told him that the Spandau prison was where the higher-ranked Nazis were imprisoned after the Nuremberg Trials. I told him that Rudolf Hess was the last prisoner in Spandau. After his flight to Scotland in 1941, he was brought back to the Trials in Nurenberg and sentenced to life in prison. Unlike all the other high-ranked people from the 3rd Reich, including Albert Speer, Karl Doenitz, etc, who were released early, Rudolf was kept in Spandau till his death. I also told him that around 2015, the WWII archives were opened to the public, but Hess's file is still a secret to this day. The 4 Allied powers took rotation when guarding Hess. He wasn't allowed to read the papers as they were, and they censored some information from him. He wasn't allowed to talk to the public either. He was the last prisoner in Spandau for quite some time till his death in the late '80s, after which the Spandau Prison was knocked to the ground. Many say that his attempt to pursue the English Royal Family must have been the reason why so many guarded him for so long. It's like they guarded a secret, not a person.

On that note, we started seeing the communist influence in the outskirts of Berlin. We even said, both of us, that it looks so much like Bucharest. We felt like we entered Bucharest. It was dark, and we were tired... but still... a lot of resemblances.

We decided to stop for food and saw the Old Spandau area with the church and all from the main street. We made a right turn at the first junction and ended up in a pedestrian area only. We got off the bikes and pushed them till we found a place to eat. It was a Balkan restaurant, which was great...



Another street view representation. We parked the C90s next to the restaurant on that narrow alleyway towards the Church:



It was dark, unlike this image, and the waiter was Serbian and lived in Romania for a while. He liked that time of his life, he said. He also said that the kitchen would close soon, so we better hurry and order something. I had some chicken while Mr M had a schnitzel.

We ate, warmed up, and decided to go see Berlin during the night before going to the hotel.

I'll show you Berlin during the night in the next episode.

[kayz1]

Looks like a good trip G.
Boy i could tell you some stories about my time in West Berlin as a lad in the Army..11th of June Street (That was for the None German speakers) anyone..
We had to spend a whole 24 hours on our own . and report back.

[George]

After our meal, we got back on the bikes and continued pushing toward the centre of Berlin. We were close now and this is how it looked on the map:



Along this route was the Siegessäule (Victory Column) in Tiergarten. We weren't expecting to see it and started going round the roundabout until finally deciding to stop and take a picture with it:



From there, we made our way towards the Brandenburg Gate. I took a video going towards it, but since I can't share it here, I will share the images we took the next day. As we turned left at the gate, we saw the Reichstag. So, instead of turning right as the satnav suggested, I told Mr M to turn left and stop to take pictures. We parked on the pavement and went for a walk in the Platz Der Republik in front of it:



After we took a few pictures, we continued towards the centre of Berlin. Somehow we got to Friedrichsbrücke:



We parked there and wandered around on foot:



Pictures with the Kolonnadenhof and Berlin Cathedral.

After looking around the area and noticing some more bullet holes in the columns and bridge, I suggested we go see Checkpoint Charlie.



And here are some pictures:



From there, Mr M suggested we see the Fuhrer Bunker:



Here are some pictures at that location:



Since it was now getting late, we made our way to the hotel:



We unpacked again, made sure both bikes were well secured to the flag post, and went for a well-deserved sleep.

The next day's weather was amazing!



We took all our stuff to the bikes and adjusted the chains on both bikes:



Once we were done, we headed into centre town again to check it out in daylight:



Besides the Reichstag, everything else was either shot while I was on the bike or in portrait format, so they're all messed up. But we did stop at the Brandenburg gate to take some last photos before heading out of Berlin:



Mr M decided to lead the way using the Via Michelin satnav app. I'll cover the next step in our trip during the next episode.

[125erCrazy]

George,
keep it coming. Love the photo of checkpoint Charlie looking towards MaccyD (no tat sellers that time of day)

So apologies its my new screen saver

[Capitano]

Excellent, George.

My neck hurts!

[George]

George,
keep it coming. Love the photo of checkpoint Charlie looking towards MaccyD (no tat sellers that time of day)

So apologies its my new screen saver

I should've captured the KFC sign next to the billboard as well. Only the "K" is visible.

I'm glad you liked the McDo picture.

Excellent, George.

My neck hurts!

I know... it's really annoying. Can you give me edit access to this thread? I can go into it and attempt to change the images with ones saved in Photoshop. I think I need a software to override the phone's orientation settings.

[125erCrazy]

I should've captured the KFC sign next to the billboard as well. Only the "K" is visible.
I'm glad you liked the McDo picture.

The shot just typified American excesses no matter where in the world they invade

[George]

After the Brandenburg gate photo, Mr M decided to use the Via Michelin SatNav app to navigate towards our next stop. That next stop was quite far and more or less coincided with the Nürburgring. I must apologise for how long it took me to write up this next step in our adventure, but it was quite discouraging, mostly because of the lack of pictures. So that meant I had to rely on my memory of this day. It took me a full day during the Christmas break to piece it all together, and I'm still missing 2 stops. Without further excuses, this is how it all went that day:

We left Brandenburg at around 10:20 on the 1st of November, 2023. This is what the flight itinerary looked like:



Of course, that's never the case when you're on the Cub and use a SatNav that's strange. Anyways, the first stop was the Petrol Station as I was running low. Red used more fuel than Mr M's "Fly" when going slower, like in urban areas. I found that at 45 MPH, Red was more economical, though. This is the Petrol Station:



We got out of that station on the wrong way for a second, so we didn't go around too much... :



After that, Mr M. and his Via Michelin were leading the way. I will never be able to retrace that section of the trip as it was simply crazy. We were taken on all sorts of agricultural roads and single-track lanes to the point where Mr. M. decided to stop and reassess. I used that opportunity to take these pictures:



(You can see my skid mark)

Right after these pictures were taken, I was going a bit fast when Mr M had to slow right down to go over a some potholes. I was standing on the pegs and realised quite late that he had stopped, so locked my rear brake and went sideways way more than I was comfortable doing while standing up. Released the back brake and managed to save it. We did hit the tarmac at some point, and we both concluded that we would never get anywhere close to our destination if we kept following Via Michelin. So we went back to Maps and continued on the roads. And this is the best representation of the stops we took that day, minus a few, and a better reflection of what lay ahead:



I don't remember much else between Potsdam and the next place we stopped to eat. We had some pastry at the Aral in Berlin but nothing else. We kept riding, and it got dark. Very dark. Mr M's intercom was now running out of battery, and as soon as it did, we pulled over to get it on charge. I did find the place:



The funny thing was, 1 km down the road, we found a place to eat. We stopped, got both intercoms on charge in my top box, and went in to enjoy some good food and well-deserved warmth:





After the meal, I took this picture:



It was 19:24 when I took that picture, and we still had 242 km left to go to get to Nürburgring.

After a further 80 km, we were in desperate need of fuel. We crossed the river Weser into North Rhine-Westphalia at Holzminden. We decided to go into town to fill up. Stopped in front of a Mercedes-Benz dealership to look for a Petrol Station. It was stupid o'clock again, and I don't have any pictures from there on.





We stopped by that 50 km/h sign on the pavement. Found a petrol station in town, filled up, and then got back to the main road doing a loop through town. That meant that we crossed the bridge over the Weser once more. Something like this:



It is getting late now, and I need to get to work tomorrow. Will write up what happened next in the next post.