Sunday, July 29: Cloudy to begin with, then hot & sunny
Hiking: 29.6 km
Home
It had rained some more during the night, but the day started clearing after a very short break. I got all my stuff together (including the two new towels) and left Kevin’s keys on the desk, as he had requested some time last night. At least no wild party girls or couples having sex in the night.
I was soon down at where the track begins and noticed that there was a white-blue-white sign with “11” on it, so about the time my recorded track had parted company with this 11, I chose to join it to see where it went. At least it remained fairly green for a while, and I noted von-Luck-Str and Spanische Allee turning up. I followed the marking over the street, and then it was briefly lost until I went through a small tunnel under the railway to Schlachtensee itself, and took up the track again. I had wondered about a couple that I had met along the way dressed in bathrobes, but this lake is a certified swimming lake and plenty of people were doing just that.
At the Grunewald Tower the track seemed a little circuitous, so I took a more direct route, this time having more luck in try to reach the destination, first the Teufelsee, and then the Teufelsberg, with a following hill that had very good views of the city. By now I was following the camera map, on a next intersection right, following intersection left basis and it worked quite well. Soon I was down in civilisation, having wanted to have had lunch for some time, I located some logs and sat down for my bread rolls. Then it was through a couple of parks to a garden community and a bit of a detour down to the River Spree. Berlin at last.
Now navigation was much easier, although I still wanted to know how long it would take me to get across one of my maps (openstreetmap, 200 m scale @ 1920*1080 resolution). Reaching the river gave me the opportunity to time from the westernmost point of the river to Charlottenburg Palace, and that was a little over an hour, up until just past 3:00. Now the question was whether I would risk it to Kreuzberg, or just stop in Tiergarten.
Interactive Map
Tiergarten took a bit longer to arrive at, just before 4:00, and I took it that that would be it for the day. Made my way to the station, then the couple of stops to the main station and awaited my train in the cool basement. Once on the train, it didn’t appear to have any of the reservations in the right places, and the seat I had reserved (#98) didn’t exist at all in this carriage. #94 was free though, and I quickly took that before any argument could begin.
The journey itself was very fast (can’t remember how long it took in 1978, but according to my diary we arrived in Berlin at 6:30 after leaving Hannover about lunchtime), less than two hours according to plan, and we were seven minutes early into Wolfsburg. Back here the flat was very hot (29°), the beans had not survived very well, and some idiot had left the staircase windows open all day (if not week). Showered and went to the new pizza place in Kleefeld (Agorino) for a pizza tonno, which was very close to crispy, possibly the closest outside of Italy. Back here I seriously considered trying out the airbed on the balcony, but that would need something under the mattress to prevent the decaying plastic matting from puncturing it, so I stayed indoors for now, but with the recently refunctionalised bedroom window completely open, and plenty of mozzie spray applied. Eventually the temperature reached a toasty 22° and I had a comfortable sleep.
