(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)
I’ve recently posted quite a few blog entries about my 1999 trip to Bavaria and Bohemia. While most of the that trip was spent in the Czech Republic, it started and ended in Germany (today’s photos are primarily from Würzburg, our last stop before flying home from Frankfurt).
This seems to be a common theme in my travel history. I’ve been to Germany six times, and changed planes there on a further five occasions. However, it had always been on the way to somewhere else. Three of those visits were with my family, when we were traveling between relatives in Switzerland and relatives in the Netherlands.
On my extended 1991 backpacking trip, I flew in and out of the Netherlands. I made it to Budapest (Hungary) and back, passing through Germany on both legs of the trip. However, it wasn’t the focus of my trip: I only spent a handful of nights there. It was even more fleeting in my 2014 travel odyssey: I walked into Germany from Luxembourg, but I was probably never more than a mile inside the country.
So, other than two nights in each of Erlangen and Trier in 1991, one night in Bad Honnef, and two nights in each of Würzburg and Munich in 1999, I haven’t had too much to report about this large country in the heart of Europe.
In a fine example of synchronicity, I picked up a library book this weekend that I had reserved some time ago. It was about road trips in the German-speaking countries, and I signed it out to see what it said about driving in Switzerland. But when I started reading other parts of the book, I realized that there was a lot about Germany that I had never seen…and that I wanted to see.
In particular, the extreme north and south parts of the former East Germany (DDR) are piquing my curiosity. I had never really thought about them as destinations, and they tend to be ignored by North American travel resources. But if I ever travel to Europe in the warmer times of the year again, I’m going to have to give serious consideration to one or both of those regions.
From visiting the location of the legendary East German beach movie Heißer Sommer, to exploring the natural wonders of “Saxon Switzerland” (Sächsische Schweiz), to museums documenting the oppressive East German Stasi (secret police), this could be a really unique trip. It just goes to show: even if you’ve been to a country many times, there is always something else waiting to be discovered.