Ground Control to Major Mom

25 July 22: More photos from the Schlosskirche — Castle Church — and the Luther House Museum, both in Wittenberg (or Lutherstadt Wittenberg, which is the name I should have originally used to search for train routes and maybe it would have saved us 1/2 hour or so).

25 Jul 22: Daily selfie from the Castle Church, Wittenberg. This is the church on whose door Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-five Theses (also known as the Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences) in 1517, leading to the establishment of Protestantism. This church has been renovated many times over since then.

More photos to follow later when I have better WiFi. So much train drama today. And it was a very warm day too. Not horrible, but annoying just the same…and wore us out pretty quickly.

25 July 22: Greetings from the Berlin Fernsehturm — also known as the Berlin TV Tower. About 275m up.

I could spend all day up here getting the lay of the land. There are awesome descriptions of what you see every 6 degrees of the compass rose.

25 July 22: After yesterday’s shenanigans, we have now figured out how public transportation is going to look from our apartment (numerous closures this week near us, both the S-Bahn and the trams are unavailable). We aren’t far from the Alexanderplatz train station, about 0.4km away.

24 July 22: Our AirBnB keys were being held for us at a restaurant across the street from the apartment building, the Eden Restaurant, which featured Vietnamese cuisine.

We decided to check it out the restaurant for dinner and it wasn’t bad at all.

24 July 22: We made it to Berlin! Our apartment is VERY spartan, definitely East German-ish. But again, the location can’t be beat!

We arrived just in time for the 9pm sunset…and now it’s dinner time!

24 July 22: They’re trying to make up some time. A nearly 1 hour delay will whittle down to about 30 min if it goes as planned.

24 July 22: Fire on the route. We are sitting in the town of Offenbach. They’re working on a new route.

“So long as they don’t run out of beer on the train…” ~Dave Vollmer

24 July 22: More chaos as we learned that the original train on the 2nd leg of our trip, from Karlsruhe to Berlin, was canceled and combined with another train.

We basically got ourselves on that other train and figured we’d just sit anywhere in First Class — we have First Class tickets — and be okay. We are at least heading in the right direction…towards Berlin…

Phew! What a chaotic morning!