Parking Tower, Autostadt, Wolfsburg, GERMANY

Lousy weather where we were, so Plan B was taken out of the freezer, quickly warmed up in the microwave, and re-labelled Plan A -- Wolfsburg!  It meant more than an hour's drive away, but when one is on holiday, no issue.

There is also a castle in Wolfsburg, but it is not at the top of anyone's list, and so I did not put it at the top of mine either.  Wolfsburg is known for something else entirely -- it is the home of Volkswagen!  Not our favourite car brand, as we've stuck with ours for 20 years now, but what is interesting in the town is the way they constructed a park of several acres devoted purely to the history of the car.

Extra 1 -- the Porsche Pavilion entrance
Extra 2 -- the now famous (at least in the EU?) parking towers, where a robot can park your car even several stories high and then fetch it again when you need it.

There are guided tours up this tower, facilitated by the same robot.  One steps into a kind of module which the robot then picks up and then it shows the passengers around various floors.  The tour doesn't take long but does manage to give a futuristic idea of parking options.  I haven't yet heard of parking towers elsewhere, though.  This kind of thing will mean a huge investment.  Anyway, this tour needs to be reserved and is fully booked days in advance, and as this is not dependent on the seasons, well, it's always fully booked.

The Audi Pavilion is being renovated, the Volkswagen buildings showed all available models.  It is possible to book a test ride.  More interesting is the possibility to buy any car in the Autostadt.  You can imagine how utterly fancy some of the prices are.  Not our kind of thing, but it's obviously a magnet for some folks.  There are also sledding and skating facilities for the kids, of which there must have been hundreds -- future clients all, right?

Instead of thinking about the cars, I set my sights on the Ritz Carlton Hotel within the same complex -- I wanted a cup of tea and a WC stop.  AW wanted some coffee.  What's the difference between a cup of tea with fresh lemon at the Ritz and the same cup of tea with fresh lemon elsewhere?  Nada.  The difference is only in one's head.  And one's pocketbook.

A very different end to the day.  We arrived back in the dark after an uneventful drive.  The chocolate cake at the Ritz still weighing heavy in our tummies, we took time before dinner.  By that time, the restaurant we had in mind was closing, so we went to Jim Block's hamburger house again.  It was just as yummy as before.

We went to bed the usual time... but our sleep was punctuated by several messages from MNL on my mobile WhatsApp.  That's a tale for another day.