Friday 9 September - Wolfsburg

Where's Bertie? He's feeling a tiny bit cheeky, sitting in a car park right next to a campsite in the Allerpark, Wolfsburg. Exact location: 52.43164, 10.81326.
Weather: Sunny intervals and a couple of heavy showers.

The weather was much more amenable to being outside this morning, so rather than dashing straight off to our next destination, we took a walk around the lake opposite to which we had spent the night - a quiet night until, at 7am, some workmen came and started laying temporary cabling immediately behind Bertie and the road sweeper starting doing repetitions of the road.

View from the opposite side of the road from Bertie

View from the other side of the lake. Bertie is semi hiding behind the fountain.

Another castle shot

Another castle-across-the-water shot

Taking in a number of points of interest with information signs on our way, we hit the main points of the town (church, rathaus, watermill), and walked through the wooded park to complete a circuit of the lake. All very pleasant, although it's another place that's only really got enough entertainment for an hour or two, not for an entire day - which suited us nicely on this occasion.

The drive to Wolfsburg (home of Volkswagen's headquarters and the worlds biggest car plant, so t'internet tells me) was about an hour, and I'm afraid to say that we came here without any intention of venturing into the city. Our sole purpose for being here is tomorrow's parkrun.

As it happens, I've spent far too big a chunk of the day putting together information about Bertie's leaks for his dealer (it's involved editing video that I took blind by waving my camera around under the floor, and anotating photos taken at odd angles with explanations as to what they're showing). Thus it was late afternoon by the time we headed out to look at the parkrun course, part of which sits about 100m one side of Bertie, and part 50m the other side.

The canal to Bertie's left

The lake to Bertie's right

As for our parking spot here, it feels a bit cheeky, being immediately the other side of the boundary fence of a campsite. If we were parked the other side of that fence, we would be paying €14.80 for a pitch without electricity. We did consider going for that option, as 20 days into the trip, our laundry situation is getting desperate. However, paying a campsite fee just to do laundry always feels like an expensive way to get the washing done (especially as campsite laundry facilities don't tend to be as good as laundrette facilities), so I have, once again, deferred sorting the bulging laundry sack for another day. Who needs clean clothes anyway?! 

Thursday 8 September - Flechtingen

Where's Bertie? He's in a gently sloping car park in a rather nice spot in the town of Flechtingen. Exact location: 52.33052, 11.24154.
Weather: Rain, rain, rain and a bit more rain.

The rain started just before we went for a run this morning and postponing for a short while didn't make it stop, so we got a little damp around the edges when we finally headed out.

Given that we weren't going to be doing anything else out of doors until it stopped, we could just have stayed in Haltensleben, but the car park there wasn't quite appealing enough, so we moved the 12km along the road to Flechtingen. There we found a car park on a notable slope, dictating that Bertie needed to park with the windscreen away from the view - rather a shame, as it was a good one.

Having not had any significant rain since the end of July, we couldn't really complain when it continued all day, and in one respect, it was most convenient. In July, we discovered that Bertie was still leaking and have since been trying to work out where the water's getting in (the leak into the living space was solved at the beginning of June; the ongoing leak is into the garage and on the sub-floor*). The problem has been that despite our efforts with a watering can and a hosepipe, we'd not been able to recreate it - it's only been happening when it rains persistently.

So, yesterday I removed our crates from the garage into Bertie's living area (via the hatch between the two spaces; I didn't have to go outside), removed his spare wheel from its mounting, and immediately found the source of the leak - a vent that sits behind his rear bumper on the outside, and behind the spare wheel on the inside. I spent the rest of the day, with a timer set for 25-minute intervals, crawling into and out of the garage to inspect the whole space, and to wring out the cloth that I had soaking up the water at the point of ingress. The good news is that a failed vent seal is a much less significant issue than a failed body panel seal, and shouldn't require us to take up residence at the dealership for another three-day stint.

Unfortunately, we also managed to establish that the driver's side rear wheel arch is also leaking, and that is a three-day fix**.

With all of the crawling in and out of the garage, some book reading and a small amount of work, the day slipped away at an alarming pace. When the rain finally let up at around 1930, we abandoned the dirty dishes to be done later and went for a quick look around Flechtingen, learning on our way of the death of the Queen.
No snaps - with the light fading by the time we went out, they had to be postponed until the morrow.  

^{(*There is no wood in Bertie's structure, so having a bit of a water leak isn't as destructive these days as it used to be. The fact that it's not impacting his living space also helps.
**The opposite one was resealed in 2019 having, it turned out, been leaking from new, but it took us two years to find the source of the leak. Other Hymer owners with the same issue told us at the time that both sides should have been resealed, but as we could find no fault with the driver's side, we didn't push the point with our dealer. Turns out we were wrong, although, at least we've discovered it just about within the warranty period.)}

Wednesday 7 September - Haldensleben

Where's Bertie? He's in a free Stelplatz (no services) literally a stone's throw from the walls of the old town at Haldensleben. Exact location: 52.29261, 11.41340.
Weather: Some overcast periods, many sunny periods. A few drops of rain. Mid-twenties and muggy.

You know what it's like when you're reading a good book and are determined to stop reading at the end of the chapter, but once there your eyes accidentally slip onto the start of the next chapter and before you know it you're engrossed and still moving forwards, rather than stopping and doing the useful things you're meant to be doing?

Bertie's currently doing his own version of that. Last Saturday morning he was supposed to be turning back westwards, yet found himself proceeding east. Then he snuck a bit further east. And today, when surely he was going to start heading back towards Belgium, which way did he go? Yep, east again (although with far more north than east in the equation today; my brief thoughts of going to look at Magdeburg were resisted).

This is not scuppering our plans, as we decided a few days ago that rather than going to a parkrun in Hannover this weekend, we would go to Wolfsburg instead.

So, to Haldensleben is where we came, to a Stellplatz that I suspect is little frequented (Bertie's all alone at the moment*) because it doesn't have any services. My expectations of the place were low, purely because of our experience in Oschersleben yesterday, and thus I've found myself pleasantly surprised. These two towns, bar the amount of graffiti, bear little resemblance to each other. Haldensleben is a nice place, with a handful of points of interest that the Tourist Office has made an effort to highlight (brass plaques embedded in the pavement attempt to direct you between them, and monolingual information boards on the buildings tell you a bit about their histories).

Here's an attempt at illustrating what the place is like:

The motorhome parking is as convenient as can be for the old town - go through the door in the wall just in front of Bertie and within a couple of minutes...

...you're in the Marktplatz, in front of the Rathaus (which houses the Tourist Info office, that wasn't open today).

A short walk down the main street (a long, well-presented pedestrianised street without a single broken window to be seen) this building caught our eye. Built in 1592 it was in a dilapidated state in 1875 when some chap with deep pockets bought the place and restored it to its former glory.

The waymarking took us down a side street (to a museum that was closed for lunch), where I snapped this shot. I do like a street where no adjacent houses share the same roofline.

So wibbly that it looks like it might collapse in on itself.

The remaining tower/town gate out of four that used to exist. Dating from the 14th century, but restored in 1988/9.

Whilst it wasn't a tremendous amount of walking around, we still thought it justified eating a huge quantity of food. I'm not sure it comes across in this snap quite how big those portions were.

A contender for Fountain of the Day, had it been running

Hands-down winner of the Fountain of the Day award.

(*My assessment was wrong. Whilst Mick was proof-reading, another motorhome pulled in.)  

Monday and Tuesday 5 & 6 September - Oschersleben

Where's Bertie? He's in a free Stellplatz in the town of Oschersleben. Electricity and water are available for small fees. Exact location: 52.02144, 11.23212
Weather: Sunny and warm (27 degrees yesterday, bit cooler today)

Firstly a quick skip back to Schöningen, where something remarkable happened: we had a Danish van on one side of us and a Czech van on the other! If we ignore Hameln (the only touristy place we've been, where there were 5 Dutch vans), we had, prior to this occurrence, only seen two other non-German motorhomes since arriving in Germany two weeks ago.

Perusing options as to our next destination after Schöningen, which sensibly would have been somewhere slightly north or west, this Stellplatz in Oschersleben, another 30km further east, caught my eye due to having a lot of reviews at an unusually high average rating. Reading some of the reviews didn't tell me what was so good about the place, but I felt that the extra detour was worthwhile to find out what the fuss was about.

The drive here was through swathes of gently undulating agricultural land often unbroken by any signs of habitation, then into the town we drove, slotting Bertie into one of the remaining spaces in the Stellplatz.

One of the 'attractions' hereabouts is the park and zoo that sits immediately behind the Stellplatz, so that was our outing for yesterday afternoon. This is the third such zoo we've visited in Germany (the first one was the location of a post-parkrun coffee meet-up; the path through the second one was part of a parkrun course), and they're not zoos like we would associate with that word in the UK. Boar, Hungarian wooly pigs, deer of various breeds, ibex, goats, sheep, llamas, horses, donkeys, rabbits and lots of different birds (from tiny finches in an aviary to ostriches). The animals provided a side interest to what would have otherwise still be a pleasant walk through parkland.

Snap taken on Tuesday's run through the zoo

Having decided to spend two nights here, we didn't want to exhaust all possibilities of things to do in a single day (in reality, it would have been comfortably possible to do so in an afternoon), so we deferred a look around the town until today ...except that I'd promised Mick an ice cream after tea, which required an 800m walk through the town. We kept our blinkers on and resisted detouring from the direct line to see anything surrounding us.

Tuesday
After running two and a half laps of the zoo, then frittering away the rest of the morning, this afternoon we walked back into town. Our early impressions of the place were cemented: it's tatty, with a lot of abandoned buildings, most of which (most notably high street shops) had broken windows and grafitti. This is not what we're used to in Germany, and having so little experience of this region, we don't know whether it's normal in these parts/in the old East Germany, or whether it's just this one town.

It's a pity we haven't got time to explore more around here to see if we can form a clearer opinion on the point.

The other thing that's unusual here, compared with our prior experience in the country, is the dearth of bike routes. One of the many reasons I'm such a fan of Germany is that wherever you park, there's always a bike path next door, providing somewhere obvious to run or walk - except that doesn't seem to be the case on the south side of Oschersleben.

So, after two days, what's my opinion of this almost universally adored Stellplatz? I don't see what the fuss is about! It doesn't seem to me to be any better than most Stellplätze that we visit (in that it's a car park, with dedicated motorhome bays, and has a service point and electricity available), but it has the downside that there's a 'world famous' motorsport arena within earshot and, for the last two days at least, has been in constant use by what sounds like high-powered motorbikes.

That said, whilst there's barely anything of the slightest interest in the town from a mainstream tourist point of view, I'm still happy to have come here. Getting a feel for the small, non-touristy places is still interesting - even if it fills less time.

The main square is the best presented bit of the whole town.

Immediately obvious that it wasn't a Catholic church!

Fountain of the Day

A good idea in theory! A bench under whose glass seat sit three solar panels, and with a USB socket at each end. Pity it's been grafittied, thus hindering the efficiency of the solar panels.

Free Stellplatz = necessary to buy at least ice cream and/or cakes in town*. Mick did take some sensible snaps of me, but I've opted to include the least flattering. 





^{(*I was contemplating today whether, when given a free Stellplatz with electricity available, the polite thing to do is to buy some of that power. Is it providing the town with some small amount of income from the provision of the Stellplatz, or is the cost of power so high just now that they're running the hook-up at a loss, and thus it's more polite not to plug in?)}

Sunday 4 September - Schöningen and Hötensleben

Where's Bertie? He's back at the Stellplatz at Schöningen, having spent the afternoon in a car park on the edge of Hötensleben.
Weather: Some high level cloud, but mainly sunny and warm (feeling positively hot in the sun)

After a week using two of the navigation Apps I downloaded, I'd concluded that Gaia was the most useful, but that it would have been more so I had access to Open Cycle Map (OCM) on it. So, I accepted their offer of a one-week free trial of their premium offering, which not only allowed me to overlay OCM onto their existing map, but also allowed me to use the navigation function.

Thus, when we set out on this morning's 16km run through the local forest, Mick had our route on his watch, and I had verbal directions being delivered to headphones. Between the two, we efficiently got ourselves around the route I'd plotted.

The problem with plotting a route from a map is the lack of knowledge as to what you'll find on the ground. Happily, only one path (less than 1km) turned out to be a rutted, trip-hazard strewn, partially overgrown affair that was unrunnable.

We didn't tarry long at the Stellplatz after second breakfast and showers, mainly because with Bertie being parked fully in the shade, we were hankering after a bit more warmth (fast forward a few hours, when the day had warmed up, and we were happy to return to a shady spot).

A 5-minute drive down the road took us to our day-trip destination, where the first thing we did was to have lunch, in a location where lunch would not have been possible before 1990. Bertie was now parked in the 'no man's land' between the old East/West German border. We hadn't gone there just for lunch; there's a section of the old border that has been made into what is effectively a small open air museum.

Looking from the car park to the main part of the site. On the left: concrete wall topped by a rounded  section to make gripping it difficult; then anti-car defences; then a ploughed strip so the footprints of anyone escaping could be seen; then the patrol area; on the right were double metal/barbed wire fences. All overlooked by watchtowers.

The information signs were informative, and helpfully (for us) bilingual

The dog run - the space in between these two fences was patrolled by dogs. Between 1983 and 1989, dog runs were installed along over half of the 1400km-long border.

An educational and eye-opening* hour was spent looking around. Probably not a place worth making a large detour to visit, but definitely worth stopping if you're nearby.

Curious as to whether there was any notable difference in the appearance of the village on the east side of the old border, we then wandered into Hötensleben. After a quick trip to the Eis Cafe (€1 per ice cream today, and not bad quality at all), a remarkably old looking church caught our attention.

Many churches we've visited in Germany claim to date back hundreds of centuries, but look curiously new, either because the old buildings have been completely subsumed by later additions, or because they were entirely rebuilt post-war (one we visited on our tour of Braunschweig was 1000 years old ...except it was rebuilt, ending in 1978). This one looked genuinely old. 1483, it turns out.

The inside didn't disappoint either

The conclusion was that, no, even though life in Hötensleben was, for 45 years, a complete contrast to the life of those living just 5km to the west**, the architecture of the town was not remarkably different from anything else we've seen in Germany.

Don't think I've seen a garden statue using a roof as a slide before, mind.

The only reason I came across the museum was because the car park is in Park4Night as a potential overnight stop. For us, there didn't seem to be any good reason to stay there, when we knew there was a perfectly good, very quiet official Stellplatz, with facilities, within a five minute drive - hence back here we came.

Statue of the Day. This may be stretching the theme slightly. We see a lot of these, most of them of better quality than this one.

^{(*I was in high school when Germany reunified, and whilst I remember it (the falling of the Berlin Wall in particular) as a major and significant news item, I didn't really understand (or have an interest in, at that time) what life had been like for East Germans, especially outside of Berlin. Today some of those details were filled in - notably the extreme efforts made to keep the East Germans inside of East Germany.
**At the entrance to the museum site was an exhibit that included quotations from residents of Hötensleben during the Cold War. One commented that, like a canary in a cage, they didn't miss freedom, because they'd never had it.)}

Friday & Saturday 2-3 September - Braunschweig and Schöningen

Where's Bertie? After a second night (Friday) in the Stellplatz in Braunschweig, he's now in a free Stellplatz on the edge of the town of Schöningen. Electricity and water are avalable for a fee. Exact location: 52.13327, 10.96
Weather: Sunny, topping out in the mid-twenties.

Friday
A quiet day. Most notable occurrence (other than a chap reversing his new-looking motorhome into the space next to Bertie and failing to notice the post behind him): a walk up to the local high point - a dizzying 89m. Disappointing summit:

Lovely parkland surrounding it:

Other than that, I read a lot, Mick did some work, and we watched the cricket*.

Saturday 
A busy day!

It started with a parkrun, which didn't go entirely well for us or for a couple of the three tourists from Scotland, as someone had tampered with one of the directional arrows out on the course, and supplemented it with a big  chalked arrow on the ground. I realised quickly that something was awry, and had the benefit of a map of the course on my phone. Mick went a bit further, before he decided he'd gone awry and backtracked. Another chap managed to add on a full kilometre. It's a relatively new parkrun, still finding its feet, and none of us was cross with our little adventure. I still managed to come first female, although not much of a triumph given there were only two of us*.

Once everyone was over the line, we all repaired to a local bakery for second breakfast:

Yes, my pastry was enormous - and very attractive to wasps. I reckon 99% of the world's wasp population lives at bakeries in Germany.

Back to Bertie for third breakfast, and then onwards to Kopernikusstraße, on the SE side of Braunschweig - the last of our scheduled revisits to Mick's childhood (or adolescence in this case). He was around 13 when he lived in Kopernikusstraße, but as he was at boarding school at Wilhelmshaven during that period, he wasn't there very much. Even so, as we got out of Bertie he walked with unerring certainty in a direction and took me to a terrace of houses sited exactly as he had described.

Neither he nor his mother could remember the number of the house, but he's now almost certain it was 20a (it could possibly have been 20c). It's second from the left in this snap:

The only other place he remembered was the bakery, where he would be sent to buy bread. The shop is still there but, disappointingly, it's no longer a baker's.

Where to next?

The 'plan' was that Braunschweig was to be the furthest point east on this trip. However, we intend to be in Hannover next Saturday for another parkrun, and that's only 70km distant. Our track record shows that we don't usually have a problem spending a whole week travelling that short a distance, but looking at the overnight options on Park4Night, no obvious itinerary jumped out at me. So, I looked a little to the east and found three free Stellplätze in a small area, which seemed like as good a reason as any to extend our easterly turn-around point.

The rural drive here didn't give me high hopes as to what we would find on arrival, and the Stellplatz felt a bit out of town (we're in the car park of swimming baths, in a residential area). However, a quick walk into town this afternoon has taught us that it is a historic place (the original village in this location is claimed to be the joint oldest in Lower Saxony), with a history of salt and coal mining, and with some fine buildings/points of interest. Even better, each POI is marked with a bi-lingual information board.

The only flaw, that we didn't spot for a while, is that they've put the arrows to the last/next POI in the same places on both the English and the German sides of the board, but as those boards sit back to back, at least one side is always wrong (sometimes both sides when the orientation of the boards is side on to what it should be).

Part of the significant Schloss complex

With an ice cream to fuel our explorations (€1.20 = cheapest yet, but also the worst quality), we managed to find a good proportion of the POIs, before wandering back to Bertie for the cricket final (Oval Invincibles won; commentary was absolutely dire).

Fountain of the Day

Not Fountain of the Day

Forgot to include this one the other day - an irresistable opportunity for 'Gayle imitates Art'. The occupants of a nearby pavement cafe had a good view of me as I contorted myself, with Mick's guidance.

^{(*What a climax to the eliminator! Trent Rockets needed an impossible-looking number of runs off the last 5 balls (in the context of the usual run rates in the women's game, where sixes are a rarity), then Sciver managed to hit three sixes in the last four balls, leaving just a 4 required from the final ball. Didn't manage it, but an exciting end all the same.
**I'd looked at last week's results and seen that it was a small event, with times that suggested I would finish in the top half. Then, as today's run director said "3, 2, 1 Go!" everyone shot off like rockets, leaving me trailing in their wake, with just the Tail Walker (actually a tail cyclist) next to me. I didn't get caught up in the excitement, but stuck to my pace, and it wasn't too long before some of those fast starters started to struggle. One person who didn't struggle, nor was he fooled (although it was a near thing) by the erroneous signage, was the chap in the Scotland vest, who set a new course record.)}

Thursday 1 September - Braunschweig (Brunswick)

Where's Bertie? He's in the Stellplatz right next to the BürgerPark in Braunschweig, where it costs €5*. Electricity and water are available for a small extra charge (in fact, so small in the case of electricity that we've bought some:
€1 for 24hr, max 3kW/h). Exact location: 52.24975, 10.51952
Weather: Sunny for much of the day, and getting nicely warm (24 degrees) after a cool start.

Morning run. Planned route around a lake was scuppered by path closures, so an out-and-back along a disused railway line cycle route it was.

My plan for today was to drive to the east side of Braunschweig, visit the last of our "Does Mick recognise this place?" points of interest, check out the location of Saturday's parkrun, then come to the Stellplatz. Mick's thoughts were to come straight to the Stellplatz and defer the other two activities until Saturday - a more efficient routing - so that's what we did.

Over lunch, I checked out the local Tourist Info website, downloaded a couple of brochures and the town App, such that when we headed out to look around this afternoon, we had a self-guided tour to follow.

The park next to the Stellplatz is sizeable and most pleasant, and it provided us with a nice off-road route into town. Once there, it was a bit of a juggle to switch between the App (which featured a map showing where we were in relation to the points of interest - a veritable plus point when there are no waymarks), the English brochure (because the App was all in German), Google Translate (because only 7 of the 12 PoIs were included in the English brochure), and my camera. A lot of phone battery was consumed, but we were successful in seeing a good chunk of the city, with its old and new buildings (some of the former really being the latter, having being rebuilt post-war), together with a side-trip to Decathlon (we bought nothing - must be a first!).

That's the Old Rathaus in the far corner of the square, centre of shot. Impressive façade, as is so often the case in Germany

The church that's just visible in the left of the Rathaus shot. The tour took us to more churches than we needed to see.

Wibbly old buildings in 'the poor district' (dating from the 1300s), juxtaposed with modern apartments.

Cathedral on the right, Schloss on the left, and tower of the new Rathaus (another impressive building) visible beyond.

Looking across the cathedral square

Something of a departure from the rest of the architecture of the city!

A small snack on the way back to Bertie ...except it was either a late second lunch or a really early tea and left us both stuffed (€9 for the two plates of food)

Sculpture of the Day contenders. They like to stick their sculptures on high points. The last one wins.

^{(*the ticket runs from 11am to 11am. We don't know whether, if we buy a new ticket at 9am tomorrow it will run for 2 hours or for 26 hours, so to be on the safe side we're going to have to make sure we're here at 11am. This could be inconvenient, and it beats me as to why they can't do the same as other motorhome parkings all over Europe with your departure time being 24 hours from arrival.)}