That was the tour that was

I am home now after 19 days of travelling. It was a very good tour, finishing with over 150 people at the outdoor concert in Altlandsberg on Saturday and 40 people at a private concert in a barn on Sunday.

I travelled home on Monday (yesterday) while it took Ray two days to get home. He dropped me off at Brandenburg airport then headed north for the ferry, staying the night in southern Sweden before the 6 hour drive from there to home. His car will have done over 4000 km (2500 miles or more). I was the lucky one – he drove the hour to the airport, I relaxed at the airport for a flight that left on time and landed 15 minutes early. My bag was one of the first on the baggage reclaim then a 15 minute wait for the bus. Perhaps it’s very unusual to have such an easy travel day but to be honest most of our travel days were fairly easy on this tour. We were lucky.

I have a number of key memories from this tour:

It was a delight to drive day after day over roads with hardly any potholes!! If you are reading this in England then you will know what I mean.

It’s a big country, the autobahns normally have a good distance between junctions and rest stops are fairly frequent. Many serve food with the goulash being a favourite. The speed takes a bit of getting used to. Long stretches have no speed limit. We could be cruising at 80 to find a column of 4 or 5 cars drive past us as if we were standing still. Driving standards were very good.

People were all very friendly. Ray has built up a network of friends over the many years he has spent travelling and playing music first in the old DDR (East Germany) and then in the same parts but in the newly unified Germany. Travelling with him, enabled me to see first hand some of the changes and to meet a variety of people. Other than Hamburg, we only visited small towns so my impressions are very specific to where were visited.

From what I understand and see, a lot of money has been put into improving the infrastructure in the old East Germany since 1990. The roads are good, many buildings have been renovated. There are some new houses and buildings but generally everything fits together well.

When you meet the people, perhaps particularly in the smaller towns and countryside, although everyone now lives in Germany, there are differences between people in the old West and old East. We were at one place where bus routes still don’t cross the old border! This surprised me as we saw many examples of cooperation between people and groups. The best story was about a power company who wanted to run cables over the land belonging to a group of farmers. The farmers asked them to bury the cables but the power company said they could not afford to do that. So the farmers, having the machinery, dug a long trench and asked the company to lay their cables along it. That’s what I call cooperation.

Now after 19 days in the “tour bubble”, it’s back to the real world …..