Booking adventure

Some weeks before had been talking to a stranger at the bar at the Hilton Hotel in the "English Garden" of Munich. We got around to me saying I was shortly to visit Berlin. He said I really should try to travel there using a land route rather than simply flying in and out. He then recounted his adventures of smuggling his brother's East German (DDR) girlfriend in the trunk of a car over the border.

So when I came to booking the trip, took up his suggestion. As I wasn't going to have my car, I chose a Heathrow-Frankfurt-Berlin flight in on 1st April and a train journey from Berlin to Hamburg on 3rd April.

Started the day at 9:45 at the dentist in Haslemere then into the office at Uxbridge for a meeting with my boss at 11:00 and finally a visit to my future boss in Hammersmith and on the way picked up the train ticket.

Ticket split between Berlin Zoo (that's what the main station in the West was called) to Helmstedt, which was the town on the West side of the border and on the "Transit Route" for both trains and the nearby autobahn. There were in effect only three land transit routes: this one for the north of Germany and one each for the middle and south.

The second portion of the ticket for the stretch from Helmstedt to Hamburg on the same train. I guess split like this so that the DDR got it's portion fairly.