Nathan’s Holiday Trek 2006
At about 8 p.m., Taco and I arrived home, after about 1050 km of driving. As I write this (on January 7th), I have picked up my dog from the kennel where she has been the past two weeks; and tomorrow morning my wife and children are coming home from Puerto Rico, so the family will be complete again.
I hope that you have enjoyed following me along on this trip.
January 6th: the drive home with a detour
The following morning, I packed and got ready to leave around 9 a.m. Just before we were going to leave, the cat decided that he needed to use the litter box one more time, so my sister waited for him to finish and then removed his dump so I would not have to drive to Holland with cat shit in the box.
There is now a nice motorway all the way from Wroclaw to the German border...
...although the rest areas are not yet up to Autobahn standards.
Last rest stop before entering Germany. I was going to fill up my car with cheap Polish gasoline (about 1 Euro/litre, or 25-30% less than in Germany) but too many other people had the same idea, so I did not bother. The cat was a bit restless. He was clearly getting tired of being in enclosed spaces, even though he had his food and litter box available in the car.
But I had one other item on the agenda, besides getting home. After my father died in November 2004, my sister and I found a small notebook among his belongings. It contained a collection of short essays and war stories, written during his years as a soldier in the Red Army and then the Polish army in exile in 1943-1945. From that notebook, I knew exactly where my father had been on the day the war ended, May 8th 1945--a small town about 30 km northeast of Berlin, called Bernau. So I decided to stop by there on my way home, out of curiosity more than anything else. Bernau turned out to be a typical, sleepy German town. I walked around a bit; as I looked at the older people, I wondered if they were children in the town when my father was stationed there. When I looked at the young people, I wondered if they might be grandchildren of the German POWs my father’s unit was guarding back then...
After spending about 45 minutes in Bernau, I got into the car and headed west towards Brandenburg, Braunschweig, Osnabrück and then the last stretch in the Netherlands.
