If one picture is worth a thousand words, this post is a very, very long one…

Last reported from Leipzig, we’re now a week-plus further into our tandem journey around Germany, eight-and-a-half weeks in and just outside Jutta’s birthplace and home for her first 15 years, Vilsbiburg (about 75km north-east of Munich.)

The ride has continued quite amazing, with intense heat, several nights camping, some serious hill-climbing (at one point burning through two batteries-full of power for just 80km) and some colourful thunderstorms which tested our cheap but brilliant 3-person Decathlon tent to the max – it passed with wet, flapping colours.

While Jutta remembered the trauma above all, it was rewarding to revisit the site of our holiday-ending crash on Daisy 1 in Plauen in 1978, just short of what was then the East-West German border.

Busting a spell in 2023 by sailing gracefully through on Daisy 2, and negotiating tram lines with great care.

Plauen , where Jutta’s great great grandparents owned the best and still most colourful hotel in town (we stayed one delightful night there this time), is now very well restored, but like so many places in old East Germany, still showing the castastrophic discontinuity of 40 years of communist rule.

For which Russia in its then guise as the Soviet Union was responsible, holding Eastern Europe hostage to its leaders’ struggle with the US and the West from the end of WW2 to the 1989 collapse of Soviet power.

With well over 4000 km now behind us – I haven’t counted them all up yet, but could be close to 5000 – here’s first a map of where we’ve been and now are, and then a selection of photos in a somewhat random order (it’s late and we need to make it to Munich tomorrow ) to illustrate, some with captions, our journey.

34 years on from reunification, the dreadful neglect of communist times continues to show.
They used to race Trabants in old East Germany. This at the wonderful motor museum in Zwickau where Trabbies were once made, and now home to VW Saxony.
The last Trabi ever made.
The machine where the GDR wove the cotton fabric soaked in plastic which made up the Trabi’s body
A favourite from pre-war German car construction.
Literally with hot and cold running water.
Zwickau, birthplace to Robert Schumann of Lieder fame.
Looming skies high up towards the old E/W German border
The gloriously OTT interior of Plauen’s Alexandra Hotel, which once belonged to Jutta’s great great grandparents.
Plauen’s no longer quite so dangerous tram lines, (Just realised typing that that tram mutates easily to trauma)…
The high Vogtland
Kloster Banz just north of my old German home Bamberg
A life without cake is possible. But meaningless.
Very satisfying half litre of Schlenkerla Smoked Beer in Bamberg, for 7 months in 1968 my home between school and university.
Meeting a fellow long-distancer on the Rathaus bridge in Bamberg, also with Bob trailer, and heading to Helsinki
Rowing club in Bamberg where trained intensely 6 nights a week in 1968, before regatta summer cut short by appendicitis.
Nuremberg castle
The courtroom of Nuremberg’s Justizpalast, where the war crimes trials of Nazi Germany’s leaders were held.
Campsite with semi-submerged tandem in swimming pool….
The open road, with large motorway ahead.
Kuchlbauer quintessentially German lunch.
Albrecht Durer’s house in Nuremberg.
Hitler’s grandstand for his Nuremberg rallies. Quietly falling apart.
When you know you’re in Bavaria. Those onion towers,.
Hundertwasser-designed Kuchlbauer brewery in Abendsberg, stumbled upon
The Hundertwasser tower at the Kuchlbauer brewery.
Bavaria’s breweries. Yes, massively concentrated around Bamberg.
Hundertwasser chimney, with resident.
Vilsbiburg, Jutta’s childhood home.
Jutta was born here….