Early yesterday morning, we arrived back from our latest German adventure with Tina (the KA) full to the brim. Another fantastic trip and yet more fantastic, retro goodies.

We left on Friday evening, driving down to Dover to get the 2am ferry to Dunkirk. Aidan always does the driving (as I can’t) so we have to carefully time everything to allow him an hour’s sleep before we get onto the ferry, as well as two more hours during the crossing. Almost a perfect outward trip this time and before we knew it, we were in Deutschland and filling up tiny Tina:

A big part of the German road tripping is ‘The Repack’. This is necessary at least once a day to ensure that all space in the Ford KA has been used to its maximum. Entailing pots being carefully newspaper-wrapped and then placed inside other pots, ‘The Repack’ is usually done in freezing temperatures and causes fingers and other extremities to become purple and inky.

Another essential part of the German roadtripping is the soundtrack. As we are using a thirteen year old Ford KA, we don’t have the luxury of a CD player. Instead we are limited to cassette tapes and the radio. Our band of choice this time were: Fleetwood Mac (as always), Talking Heads, Brakes, Haven, The Supernaturals and – bought from a German flea market – EMF. Fantastich.

We were struck this time by how amazing much of the architecture is in Germany. Many of the buildings look incredibly brutalist; others more 1950s. One of my favourite features is the fashion for putting murals on the ends of buildings:

Now, I’m not suggesting anything here about Germans (and there’s undoubtedly something lost in translation), but lets have a closer look at that sign:

Cakes and crack? Surely not? Actually, in the Midlands, your ‘keks’ are your trousers. So perhaps it’s actually ‘trousers and crack’? That makes much more sense…

Well, they weren’t really upside down trains. They dangled from the tracks at the top! Again, I can’t remember for the life of me which town/city we were in. The whole rollercoaster-like-contraption twisted and wound through the centre of the city like a dragon’s spine; we spent a good hour chasing charity shops and kauf-houses around, seemingly following the twists and turns of this beast. It was staggeringly impressive.

My hastily shot pictures through the windscreen don’t do it justice.

**Update!** Have since discovered that it is the Wuppertal Schwebebahn. It appears that it’s quite well known…

Aidan spotted this mosaic on the side of a building. He’d run off to find a toilet, leaving me to guard Tina. We then did a driveby of this wall – is that the strangest sentence ever written?

“What did you do on your holiday in Germany?”

“Oh, we did a driveby of a wall!”

“Fascinating…”

Well, for WGP pottery fans, there is a good reason for it:

So, yes, we are mad. But there was a good reason for it.

We saw this in an antiques shop and could not decide whether to get it or not. It was only thirty Euros, but it was very heavy. We just couldn’t make our minds up whether it was possibly Fifties – therefore cool – or Eighties… then not so cool. After umming and aahing over it for a while, we decided to leave it. Not to worry: I bought a 1950s umbrella for a Euro from the same place and an amazing wall plaque… more about those another post!

This is just a quick (I say quick, it’s taken me nearly an hour!) taster of the German trip. I know what you’re all here for really… but you’ll just have to wait until later for pictures of the finds.

I’ll leave you with this. It’s a picture of Aidan’s face* when he realised that we’d been driving on not much more than fumes on the way back to Dunkirk.

*Note: this was staged afterwards once he’d calmed down a bit.

Well, later on I’ll start the mammoth (but fun) task of photographing and blogging about the finds. For now, I’ll leave you with a sneak preview: