Potsdam - Berlin - To France the Long Way 2009

June 21, 2009

Potsdam - Berlin

In the morning we cast a last glance at Sanssouci Park before heading for today's destination, Berlin. It wouldn't have been hard, though, to spend a few more days here without getting bored.

On our way out of town we plan our route to allow us to visit the historic Cecilienhof Castle where the Potsdam Conference was held in July and August of 1945. Participants Stalin, Churchill and Truman met to negotiate the fate of the defeated Nazi Germany which agreed to unconditional surrender nine weeks earlier. The approach to Cecilienhof, located in an idyllic, large park, is on pleasant bike paths.

We ride through the pretty Neuer Garten, setting of Cecilienhof Palace

Cecilienhof was the location of the Potsdam Conference. Today it is a museum as well as a hotel.

A sign tells us: This star of red geraniums framed with blue hydrangeas was planted in July 1945 for the coming conference of the "Big Three". I don't see the blue hydrangeas.

We are now about to enter Berlin and I am very excited when we cross the Havel on the historic Glienicke Bridge which links Berlin and Potsdam. The Glienicke Bridge is sometimes called the Bridge of Spies. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States used it three times, in 1962, 1985 and 1986, to exchange captured spies. It is hard to imagine that scenario today as we blithely cross the former border between East and West Germany on our Bike Fridays.

Approaching the historic Glienicke Bridge

A historic bridge and a notable moment for us, too - we rode our bikes to Berlin

American and Hungarian spies disguised as German cyclists, about to enter West Berlin

It's still quite a distance to the center of Berlin where my daughter-in-law lives and where friends of friends are renting us a small apartment for the week we plan to stay here. We're surprised to see that Berlin is not flat as a pancake and that we even have a few modest hills on our way. Needless to say, since I've said it so often before, using our GPS track we ride through the outskirts of the city to our destination as if we were natives of Berlin. "Wir sind Berliner!" Wow, we made it and are feeling very jubilant!

We don't do much sightseeing on our days in Berlin. Our eight-year-old granddaughter Sarah is much more interesting! We are happy in our neighborhood, Schöneberg. Berlin is a big city where you can get a small-town feeling in your Kiez, or neighborhood. After two days we are greeted by the shop keepers as if we belonged there. The streets here are full of Indian, Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Turkish and other non-German restaurants and cafés and little shops. I love the international feeling in the streets of Berlin. For all of Munich's virtues, this is missing.

We also take care of laundry, emails and the sort of things you do on your days off from cycling. Settling into our apartment in Schöneberg, I make the interesting discovery that the fuel bottle with denatured alcohol that I had packed in a dry bag along with my sleeping bag, pillow and therma-rest is empty and everything else is full of alcohol! (I already mentioned this in my introduction on our gear, sorry for repeating myself, but this is where the story belongs.)

Fortunately we never camped on the way to Berlin; that would have been an unpleasant surprise at the end of a day of cycling. Nothing was permanently damaged and being in a city with laundramats, washing and drying the stinky sleeping bag was no problem. After that I was very careful to close the special safety cap on the bottle properly and it never happened again. Incidently, the dry bag is absolutely water proof, from the inside anyway. Not a drop of the alcohol escaped and I never even got a whiff of it while we were traveling.

Just a few photos to show we really did venture out of our part of the city a few times.

An interesting historical site near where we are staying is the Schöneberg Townhall. It was from the balcony of the townhall that in 1963 John F. Kennedy made his memorable speech and moved the masses with his unforgettable words "Ich bin ein Berliner!", expressing his solidarity with the population of West Berlin.

June 1963 - Excerpt from Kennedy's speech at the Schöneberg Townhall: "Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was civis Romanus sum [I am a Roman citizen]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is 'Ich bin ein Berliner'... All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words 'Ich bin ein Berliner!' "

Memorial Plaque to Kennedys Speech in front of the Schöneberg Townhall

We did just a bit of sightseeing in Berlin: Here my trusty Bike Friday in front of the Reichstagsgebäude, meeting place of the German parliament

Berlin is good for cycling with plenty of bike lanes. Here we visit the Brandenburg Gate (Brandenburger Tor), one of the main symbols of Berlin and Germany

Today's ride: 40 km (25 miles)
Total: 778 km (483 miles)

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