Trip to Berlin and Points South

The “Elegant Elba” is how Viking described the land-cruise. But the linchpin for us was Berlin. That’s where the tour would start. “We need at least three or four days in Berlin on our own,” Frank said when we put down our deposit. I was euphoric. I had never been to Berlin, virtually rebuilt after WWII, and I longed to see the architecture that had so impressed Frank on his visit nineteen years earlier. He’d talked about the dining room of a once-grand hotel encased in glass in the middle of a modern shopping center and his discovery of Hitler’s unmarked suicide bunker site beneath an asphalt-covered parking lot of an apartment complex. At a bookstore on Linden Street, Frank had found a book in English that led him to the site. When he shared his discovery with a German who lived nearby, the man was shocked.

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