After having said goodbye to our children - who are now both 17, and ready to take on the world and attend Coldplay concerts in Hannover without the help of their parents - we stepped into our car and left Frankfurt. I am tempted to say: "we put our feet on the accelerator and drove into the great unknown", but that would be stretching the truth. In reality, we entered the word "Dessau" into the navigation-system of our rental car and selected the option "fastest route". Several hours later, we arrived in Wittenberg by a much slower route, but we should point out that this was our own fault, not the fault of the "navi" (Germans have a penchant for the anglified diminiutive, as is also apparent in terms such as "handy" and "Schumi"). First of all, we unwittingly returned in the direction of Frankfurt after having parked for a short coffee break. It took us half an hour to understand why our navi continued to suggest us to make a u-turn. Secondly, we discovered on-line that nearby Wittenberg had a much nicer selection of decently priced hotels with free Internet, complimentary breakfast and free parking than was the case in Dessau, which was admittedly home of Bauhaus and an entry point into the UNESCO world heritage site called "Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz" (about which more in tomorrow's blog). So it came to pass that instead of Dessau, we spent the night in Wittenberg, which the local authorities market as "Lutherstadt Wittenberg", to highlight the fact that it was here - and not in another Wittenberg - that Martin Luther nailed his 95 objections to the selling of indulgences on the door (or, better, The Door) of the local church. To at least one of us, Luther does not look like a firebrand or a revolutionary, let a alone a man who singlehandedly caused a schism in the almighty Roman Catholic church. On the contrary, from the portraits that appear in almost every shopwindow in the main street where our hotel was located, he looks complacent and disinterested, more like a wealthy merchant than a medieval Che. I am sure that the girl who welcomed us at our hotel (Stadthotel Schwarzen Bear) couldn't care less about our speculations about the true nature of the founding father of Protestantism, because she seemed to care very little about anything whatsoever. Indeed, it was somewhat of a miracle that we finally found ourselves with the key of our room in our hands.