Berlin
After eleven days of forest, lake and coast, two nights of city. Berlin is the one stop on this trip where the interest is human rather than geological — and it is a good place to be rained on.
🏞️ Natural beauty
Berlin is startlingly green for a capital — roughly 2,500 parks and green spaces. Tempelhofer Feld is the strangest and best: 303 hectares of decommissioned airport, runways and all, left deliberately unbuilt after a 2014 referendum. Berliners cycle, kite-buggy and barbecue on it; the perimeter walk takes about an hour and a quarter.
The Tiergarten (210 ha) runs from the Brandenburg Gate to the zoo, and the Grunewald is the largest urban forest in Germany at 3,100 hectares of beech, oak and pine. If you want water after the Baltic, the Müggelsee in the southeast is the city's biggest lake and has a fine shoreline path.
🧭 Places to see
- Break the drive here. A Cistercian house founded by the Ascanian margraves in 1258 and the first brick Gothic building in Brandenburg — secularised in 1542, left to decay, then restored from the early 19th century under Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The west façade, the lily and vine-leaf brickwork and the animal frieze are the things to look at. Open daily 09:00–18:00 (Apr–Oct); €6 adult, €3.50 reduced. ~70 km north of Berlin.
- Free, but advance registration is mandatory and peak-season slots go weeks ahead. Every visitor's full legal name and date of birth must match the photo ID they present on the day.
- Five museums on one island. Note the Pergamonmuseum is shut — closed October 2023, with the north wing and central building not reopening until 4 June 2027, and the south wing (Ishtar Gate, Market Gate of Miletus) not before the 2030s. The Neues Museum's Nefertiti and the Alte Nationalgalerie are the compensation.
- The only place the death strip survives in depth — wall, control strip, watchtower and documentation centre together. Free. Far more affecting than the painted stretch at the East Side Gallery.
- Ten minutes apart, and best walked between rather than photographed separately.
- Bring or hire bikes. There is nothing else quite like riding down a disused international runway.
🏛️ History
Berlin is a city that keeps its scars visible on purpose. It was the capital of Prussia, then of the German Empire, then of the Third Reich; it was bombed flat, partitioned between four powers, cut in half by a wall for twenty-eight years from 13 August 1961, and reunified in 1990. Almost every major sight here is a decision about how to remember something.
The Reichstag is the clearest example: Norman Foster's glass dome, opened 1999, puts the public physically above the debating chamber and lets them look down into it. The Wall Memorial on Bernauer Straße is another — a street where the building fronts were in the East and the pavement in the West, so people jumped from upper windows in the first days.
The 65th anniversary of the Wall's construction falls on 13 August 2026, with official commemorations at the memorial. That is after you leave, but the run-up may mean extra exhibitions.
🍴 Places to eat
Google-rated 4★ and up. Tap a name to open it in Google Maps.
Two Berlin obligations if you want them: Currywurst, and a proper Turkish or Syrian meal — the city does both better than anywhere else in Germany.
🏨 Where to stay
Two nights, hotel — no camping on this stop. Mitte or Prenzlauer Berg puts you walking distance from Museumsinsel and the Wall Memorial; Kreuzberg is livelier and better for eating. The practical constraint is the car: pick somewhere with parking, ideally with a charger, and then leave the ID.4 alone for two days — the U-Bahn and S-Bahn will beat it everywhere.
⚡ Getting there & charging
~270 km and about 3 hours from Prerow. The natural line is the A19/A24, but Chorin sits on the A11 instead — running A20 east and dropping south on the A11 costs roughly 30 km extra and is the version of this leg worth driving. Ionity coverage on both corridors is good, and this is one of the easiest charging legs of the trip.
In the city, charging is plentiful but street chargers get occupied; a hotel or car-park charger is worth paying for. Berlin has an Umweltzone covering everything inside the S-Bahn ring. Battery-electric cars are not restricted by it, but confirm the current badge requirement for a foreign-registered EV before you go — it is a five-minute check and the fine is not worth the gamble.