In planning the trip, there were a couple things I discovered.
Frankfurt and Berlin have quite a bit of distance between them.
We were going to have some long distances to cover at the beginning of the trip in order to have a more leisurely end of the trip.
We were only going to travel about half the trip on our own before meeting up with my friend.
The boyfriend wanted as much downtime as possible while I wanted to see as much as possible.
All of this made for some interesting planning in order to accomodate everyone’s ideas and requests, and we were lucky in that my friend is very easy going and didn’t have many requests once she joined up with us. She was just along for the ride, and it’s awesome to have a travel companion like that, especially when you are me and overly plan everything.
We saw and experienced so much, it would take days to recount on here. So I’ll give a photo recap of the trip instead.
December 29-30: CLE to Frankfurt to Berlin
Arrived in Frankfurt and caught a train toward Berlin. The train had one change over and we missed the next train to Berlin because there were literally thousands of people trying to make the trip. We were able to catch the next train, standing room only.Arrived at our hotel, dropped off our things and changed clothes, and then headed out to explore the city at night. We even ate our first currywurst–amazing!
December 31-January 1: Berlin
On New Year’s Eve we took a tour of Berlin and learned a lot about the history of pre- and post-WWII Germany.Stop along a short section of the Berlin Wall. Only this short section still remains standing.One of my favorite stops was a German Christmas Village, where we had interesting meats and candies. I bought some ornaments and gifts for friends and family.We finished the tour at the government buildings. My German managed to color coordinate.We crammed in with the crowd in front of the Brandenburg Gate New Year’s Eve night and watched the internationally televised show and fireworks. The evening ended with the Hoff singing on stage. PERFECT!
January 2: Berlin to Dresden to Nuremburg
We caught an early train out of Berlin to Dresden. We had quite a distance to go between Berlin > Dresden and Dresden > Nuremberg.Dresden was freezing but very pretty. We learned it was one of the most bombed cities and had very little original architecture remaining, sadly, but we walked to the river to get photos of the castle and had an awesome lunch.
January 3: Nuremburg to Munich
Our train from Dresden to Nuremberg was delayed because of snow so it took us almost five hours to get there, and we didn’t arrive until after dark. We explored the next day, walking around the walled city and touring the castle.Also bombed during the war, Nuremberg still has quaint, Germanic looking buildings and is a beautiful city. We captured a view of the rooftops and church steeples from the top of the tower in the castle.We were obsessed with this little restaurant just around the corner from our hotel and had lunch there. We sat at a table with a German couple we couldn’t understand and ate little nuremberger sausages.
We were sad to head out of Nurembrrg, but we had to catch a train to Munich for the second half of our trip where we were meeting up with our friend. The days seemed to go by at the right pace, but everything was still over so quickly. Berlin, Dresden and Nuremberg were amazing, but all of Bavaria was still ahead…
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