Jax and the Village of Death

I had a meeting late last week in a place whose name translates as Death Village. Fittingly, it was waay out in the middle of nowhere Schleswig-Holstein. So far out, in fact, that I had to stop and drag limbs out of the road on the way to the hotel. People just don't go to that part of the world it seems. I knew from the beginning that this was a bad sign. Clearly, this was some kind of assassination attempt in disguise. The trip did not start well. The first thing I did was break my TomTom mount. This was most annoying, but fortunately I had a backup mount at home, but quickly discovered it didn't work well. So when I was meant to be driving and trying to beat rush hour in as many cities as possible, I was going around from store to store learning that they don't make mounts for my model anymore. So, with my TomTom mounted insecurely, I took off for Germany. My hotel (right on the Baltic Sea) turned out to be much nicer than I had expected. In fact, really nice. My room was huge, it had a kitchen, two bedrooms, two floors, and a really big livingroom. It was nicer than my apartment.



This was, also, the weekend when my german skills decided to completely fail me. My comprehension has been mostly good, better than normal, in fact. However, my menu reading has failed totally. Thursday night, I managed to get a big plate of cold pickled beef with fat jelly. Saturday night, I managed to get a giant roulade made with raw meat and bacon. Yuck. I don't get it, in both cases I got something almost as I expected, except cold or raw. There must be some keyword I missed. I just hope I don't get sick. Maybe it's a northern Germany thing?

Day one was devoted to my meeting. The notable part of it was the lunch at the local caf/porn outlet. Yes, their caf had a larger selection of porn on the counter than food. The siteseeing phase of this trip has been a bit scattered. Mostly I've been driving around, mostly back and forth. It's also been hampered by things being on limited schedules for the off season. The first major site was Lübeck. It's quite a nice city and pretty compact. A bit like a Dutch city with lots of canals and water. The next stop was Bremen to see the statue of the Bremen Town Musicians.

It was much smaller than I expected, and so a little disappointing. The rest of the city wasn't bad, it seemed to have some character and atmosphere, but not a compelling tourist stop.

Day two of the weekend started out with a walk around Celle, basically a nicely preserved town of half-timbered buildings. Then, to kill some time before the palace opened, I drove up the road to Bergen-Belsen and walked around the former concentration. Then back to Celle to go through the palace there. Next stop was up the road still further (yes, opposite from home) to the Panzermuseum. There's not much to recommend in the northern bits of Germany, but the Panzermuseum is one of them. It has just about every tank of note ever and all appear well preserved and maybe even in running order. And it's a fitting setting surrounded by panzer bases, it just feels like the kind of area that was meant for tanks (which is probably why it's there).


I've also decided I want a geländewagen, preferably an old, beat up one that I can just drive without caring about. Don't ask why, I'm just weird.

Anyhow, the rest of the pics from the trip are here, here, and here.