There is more to Germany than the cliches but this bit is mostly about Riesling and Volkswagens

From Denmark we headed back south to Bielefeld (500 odd kilometres away), another slightly nondescript city.  We went this way to catch up with Chris for a night and again, conveniently there happened to be a festival on.  This time it was a wine festival.  As one of the resident Germans told us “the Riesling is good, the other whites are ok.  Don’t drink the red wines though – we don’t know how to make those...”.  I don’t know a lot about German red wine making skills, but they make a fine grape juice and a good Riesling! 

From Bielefeld it was another 160km drive to Wolfsburg, a city that exists because of Volkswagen.  As it was on the way, we thought we’d stop and check out the VW Autostadt, a massive (25 hectare) complex that was initially designed to be a place that proud VW owners could come to collect their new cars direct from the factory.

  With typical Teutonic efficiency it was decided that they would make a theme park for VW and their associated brands (VW own Skoda, Lamborghini, Bentley, Audi, Seat and Bugatti).  Each brand has its own specially themed pavilion, making the park something of an architectural melting pot.  It’s not cheesy though (except for the black monolith that makes up the Lambo building that has a revolving wall featuring a bright orange Murcielago).  The whole place is as much like a design portfolio as it is anything to do with cars, in fact the cars almost are secondary to the brands themselves.  However they have a great collection of classic cars, heavily skewed towards the VW brands (including replicas of Ferdinand Porche’s  original “beetle” prototype).   Highlights are Prof Porsche’s own beetle, the last beetle ever made that rolled off the production line in Mexico a few years back (odd seeing this classic 60’s icon with a factory installed CD player) and the classic sports car and luxury car collections.  Alas there is no Bugatti pavilion and no Bugatti Veyron to play with (the fastest road car ever made).  But otherwise this is a really interesting place to visit, if a little strange.  Once you get past the 60 globes of the world in the floor of the entry pavilion, the marathon that was just finishing inside as we arrived,  the fog tunnel, the kids playground (complete with race track and giant trampoline engine), the twin towers filled with cars ready for delivery (automated of course), and of course the Lambo in the wall, it all is quite sane and normal really.   No really, it is.  Just very, very German.  It’s great!  Anyway, we spent almost 5 hours wandering around and didn’t see everything (and that was even considering the fact that as it was a Sunday we couldn’t go on the actual factory tour) so it’s quite absorbing.  Especially if you like Volkswagens. 

From there we drove to Berlin.  Not a particularly interesting drive, although we proved that out little diesel Renault could happily do 150 (although we didn’t really do it that happily) and we were still getting overtaken by the proper cars who were booting along at 200kph.  Clearly this is the one place in the world where having a fast car actually makes sense.  Also, although wind turbines are dotted all over the place in this part of the world, I haven’t seen a greater number of them in one place than here.  Right near the nuclear power plants.