Day 14: Berlin to Brussels

We started our day in Berlin, walking only a block or so to a cafe that had cakes and pastries that were worthy of a transatlantic flight all by themselves. After that, we checked out of our room, and wandered around to see the few places that we hadn’t yet had time for, and I did a really bad job getting pictures.

Missed the beginning of the trip? Start here.

We picked up lunch at a Greek food stand, and then hopped in the car headed west. While there was a fair bit of unrestricted driving, we also hit a few traffic jams from road construction. The 198-mile segment to Hannover was at an average speed of only 54 mph. Since it took us closer to 4 hours than the 2 we might have hoped for, Hannover ended up being the spot for dinner.

Hannover

I was behind the wheel for the drive to Hannover, so Andrew was in charge of picking out a spot to eat. He actually succeeded in picking something out, for a change. We headed for the center of town, found a spot to park, and started walking. The weather was nice, and what we found was that we were right in the center of a pretty lively shopping and entertainment area, with lots of shopping, a semi-underground mall leading into a rail station, live music, and a farmers market. Andrew ended up getting the food he had a craving for, but at a completely different place. I found a stand outdoors where I grabbed some sort of wurst on a bun.

I couldn’t help noticing the New Mexico plate on this mural near where we ate. American “car culture” has some reach.

After dinner, we took the scenic route back to the car, passing a few familiar, if slightly different places along the way…

Last Hurrah for the Megane

After dinner, we headed back to our car and set out for what would be our last stretch of driving in Europe, and would include the last stretch of unrestricted speeds. We still had to deal with a fair bit of traffic, but as it got later the roads opened up a bit. By the time we arrived at our hotel in Brussels, we’d covered 300 miles averaging 75 mph. Since it was nearly one o’clock in the morning, we turned out the lights pretty quickly.

I’ll go ahead and spoil some of the fun. We spent a grand total of $323.59 in fuel (diesel) purchases, and covered just over 2,700 miles, at a 36 mpg average. That’s an average fuel purchase price of $4.31/gallon, which is cheaper than a lot of places in California as I write this. Including the cost of the car itself and parking, it’s still cheaper than what we would have paid for two train tickets for the first leg of the trip. It wasn’t a shift-yourself Opel, but it served us pretty well. Here’s one last short video, this time Andrew driving: