The plan for today was to visit Seville, 2 1/4 hours inland by car. We left right after breakfast and arrived at about 11:30. We travelled on good 4 lane highways virtually all the way, through varied countryside, including mountains and "plains in Spain", marveling at the seemingly endless plantations of olive trees. Following Rick Steves' guidance we found an underground parkade very close to our destination in the centre of Seville. As we emerged from the par...

Right after an early breakfast we took a cab ride to Tegel airport. Traffic was light and we arrived in about 15 minutes. We seemed to be the only non-Germans on the Air Berlin flight -- no surprise there -- and by 1:00 pm we were in Malaga. We got our Ford Focus rental from Hertz quickly and without hassle, unlike the Dollar experience in Berlin! About 20 minutes later we were at our hotel. It's a small family run hotel (only 11 rooms) up on a mountainside on t...

Ron and Evelyn felt like they needed a bit of a rest this morning, so Sherry and I decided to rent some bikes, which were conveniently available from right in front of our hotel. Berlin seems to be a very cyclist friendly city, with lots of bike lanes/paths and a lot of people on bikes. We ended up cycling for a good 3 hours, mostly in the Tiergarten (the Central Park of Berlin) but also along the Spree. We went as far as the Reichstag and saw some of the same s...

We could sleep in a little later this morning, as I had previously made a reservation on line to visit the Reichstag (German parliament building) at 10:45. We took a 3 km cab ride there and spent a little time at the nearby Brandenburg gate (see pic) before heading over to the Reichstag. I showed them the official looking letter they'd sent me (typical German bureaucracy) and we made our way through the security apparatus. We wound our way up, and then down, t...

Right after breakfast at the hotel we set the GPS for Dresden and 2 hours later we arrived at the VW Transparent Factory in Dresden. This is the factory with glass walls and "Canadian maple" floors where they've been building the Phaeton, VW's high end luxury model (see pic) since 2001. We had to wait until 12:00 for the English tour (German tours were filled up) so we killed some time in the cafe, listening to live piano music. The 90 minute tour was good, but ...