This morning we woke up at around eight o'clock, then breakfasted and dressed and packed and everything. We said goodbye to Opa and Uncle M., then Mama and Ge. went off to the train station as Papa and the rest of us stepped into the car and set off home, in good spirits after a most enjoyable weekend.

First we wound our way through Kevelaer and Winnekendonk, with their low rows of brick or white-painted houses, and old-fashioned air. Then, after a "pit stop" at the gas station, we were out in the open, flat terrain, roaring along the highway in our small orange-red Audi. The sun was shining, and fresh green fields and darker green leafy trees met the eye from near and far, the fields were freshly verdant where they were not yellow with remaining hay stalks or bristling with corn, and cows and horses were grazing contentedly. In the smaller roads and paths that run parallel to the highway I saw people taking their Sunday exercise, on horses or on bikes or on foot, and in one case with their dogs.


Industrial Scene, Rhein/Ruhrgebiet

It seemed that in no time, however, we had crossed the Rhine and were at the heart of the Rhein-Ruhr industrial region. The fields and woods were interspersed with landscapes in smokestacks and smelters and warehouses. There were lines of trees along the highway that seemed like ineffectual fig leaves. I'm not sure if they're supposed to be hiding the industrial buildings from the highway, or the highway from the industrial buildings. Perhaps both. Or perhaps they're there for a better reason. T. took many photos of the cooling tower of a power plant, which looms over a portion of the road.


Cooling Tower

Here, as elsewhere, the roads were walled in with sound barriers. In terms of colour and design, they are exercises in bleakness; some are even more depressing than others because they have doors in the middle of them that probably lead to nowhere. The rare exception: barriers composed of glossy transparent plexiglass that is dashingly adorned with blue crests or the like, and that permits the beauty-starved automobilist a view of the verdure beyond. But the only relief for the tedium of the non-transparent walls was vines and graffiti. The vines often looked very pathetic, straggling solitarily up the unyielding wall at long distances from each other. At one spot the plants were plumper and healthier, and full of small white blossoms, but they looked as if they were trying to creep over the wall and get away as quickly as possible. As for the graffiti, I wonder who would take the trouble to spend much time, travel and paint, and to wander out to the middle of nowhere to immortalize such profound messages as "HSR" (or "HSRocks," where space permitted) ten or so times. I suppose it testifies to the potency of teenage boredom.

Near Bielefeld, at any rate, the scene became pastoral again. Small, thickly wooded hills rose and fell, with sloping meadows and fields tucked into them. In one field, it looked as if the golden hay bales were running a race along the furrows to the bottom of the slope. The houses were idyllic though sometimes ramshackle, dark red and dark brown and white, often in a cluster with barns. There were also fields of sunflowers. Along the highway the crests of the hills were sometimes cut off, revealing the dark brown layers of rock. At last there was a beautiful long valley, which was still more like a picture-book than the past countryside, with tree-lined avenues, picturesque villages, and an open and friendly air. Nowhere were there castles or ruins, but it didn't matter. It also didn't matter that there was still the occasional wind-powered generator that, a pale white giant, rose with startling abruptness out of the scenery. Even the wayside shrines of the twin deities of Aral and McDonald's didn't matter so much (except at Irxleben, which looked like a deeply unpleasant place to live).

Valley in Wesergebirge(?)

Then the rolling terrain made way for flat terrain again, and the straggling but full-canopied beeches and oaks and other leafy trees were scattered, and then replaced, with thinner pines. The large white clouds gradually made way for a greyish cloud cover and rain. We stopped at one Raststätte ("rest station") that had a gas station and restaurant and "WC" (toilets). It was not as big as some others, and did not have vast parking lots full of trucks in limbo, nor did it have the odd angular "space-age-esque" architecture that I've come to associate with the Flintstones and Jetsons, and with American diner-restaurants of the 1950s. Anyway, our trip soon resumed and, after a long time, we were near Berlin. Then the traffic became denser. A sign setting the speed limit to 60 km/h became redundant, a police car containing a yawning officer was parked in a closed-off lane, a dark helicopter flew loudly overhead, and signs proclaimed that there was a change of route due to construction.

During the delay I looked excitedly at license plates, which was easier to do when we were no longer going up to 190 km/h. Earlier I had also tried to decode the region abbreviations on the plates (KLE stands for Kleve, B for Berlin, GE for Gelsenkirchen, etc.), and I had observed after we passed Magdeburg that most of the cars that were going the fastest and weaving in and out of the lanes were from Berlin. Now that the traffic was slower I also looked at the nationalities as indicated by the EU or other stickers. There were many Polish cars, some Dutch, one Russian and one Italian and one French, one Latvian or Lithuanian ("LT"), one from Great Britain and another from Ireland, and so on and so forth. I admit that these censuses would probably have been more profitable and more intelligent if I knew about and had been looking at the mechanics of the cars themselves, but my process was highly amusing nonetheless. By the way, I think it is quite interesting how much more one can get out of travel if one has enough knowledge. Clouds are no longer so boring if one knows meteorology, weeds and trees if one knows botany, the terrain if one knows geology, overhead passes if one knows architectural engineering, etc.

Anyway, as we reached the detour and turned off (onto the A10, I believe), we saw the construction work; chunks of highway stood in odd and funny isolation in the most random places. Unfortunately we could not drive back to Schöneberg through Zehlendorf, but drove for what seemed like ages along the A10, which runs south of Berlin through forests and fields that are eerily devoid of houses or people -- godforsaken, one might say. There were no signs indicating how to get into western Berlin by an alternate route. So we drove on towards Schönefeld up until the exit at Treptow-Köpenick, at which point we found our way back along the route which we take to visit Uncle Pu and Aunt K. in the countryside. The city did, I am afraid, appear chaotic and somewhat ugly as we drove in, by contrast to the previous scenes -- though it looked infinitely preferable to the stretches of industrial wasteland along the Teltower Kanal. As we turned into the Hauptstraße, I noticed that my size references had changed too; we passed along five or six-storey apartment buildings that I'd seen hundreds of times before, and was impressed by their height.

And now we are at home again, comfortably ensconced in front of our respective computers, and, in Papa's and Mama's case, resting in the corner room.

All photos taken Aug. 12, 2007 by me, though third may be by T. (T.'s photos are better, but she might write a blog post and use her photos for it too, so I didn't want to take them.)