Our last day in Berlin, our last day of the trip. Tomorrow we will be homeward bound. We enjoyed our last time to sleep late and then spent most of the day on Museum Island visiting museums. Before going, we went shopping at the Ampelmann shop. The ampelmannchen are the graphics used on the streetlights for Walk and Don't Walk in what used to be East Berlin. After unification, they were removed. However, the people had such a strong response and preference for t...

Our day trip to Potsdam started with pickup at the hotel for a shuttle to the tour starting point. The shuttle was about ten minutes late arriving at our hotel. That was an exception to the normally on-time performance of every tour and reservation (not counting the late start from United Airlines in Albuquerque). The beginning of the bus trip was quiet, but we stopped to pick up our guide near the dividing line between Berlin and Potsdam. As soon as she climbe...

For our first full day in Berlin we decided to see the sights related to WWII. Many of them are within walking distance of the hotel so I planned a loop to walk around. We started going south from the hotel to start the morning at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. It is entirely outdoors with displays about the history on a wall surrounding a courtyard with more displays. Inside the courtyard are two authentic pieces of the wall and more photographs on display. Afte...

Today we left Luebeck driving to Berlin, but on the way we stopped by the small town of Wittenberg. The trip to Wittenberg took us about an hour and a half out of the way, and the rain was heavy for quite a bit of the way making the driving more stressful than anticipated. We stopped for a break thinking that we should just forget the side trip and get on to Berlin, but by the time we had finished our snack, the rain was gone and we decided to continue on the pla...