Other than my ramblings, I will quickly update our progress. After Berlin , we visited Wolfsburg and the VW Autostadt, wound our way down the magnificent Rhine gorge with a castle at every bend, visited the Kloster Erebacher, the 11th century monastery where all of the interior scenes for The Name Of The Rose were filmed, visited Stuttgart to see the Porsche and Mercedes Museums, and spent some time in the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest, cuckoo clock land. Germany...

If it is one thing that Germans do well is cars. While in Deutschland, I was fortunate to visit the VW Autostrada, a theme park built next to the factory in Wolfsburg, and the Porsche and Mercedes museums in Stuttgart. The Porsche museum is surrounded by the factory and everything Porsche. The VW experience was more a theme of car design, engine technology, the move to green technology, and a showcase of the brands that they own including Audi, Skoda, Porsche, ...