Day 02: From Berlin to Teltow

Date	January 4th, 2024 (Thursday)
Today's Distance:	18 miles / 29 km
Route and Stats	Route Video
Total This Camino:	18 miles.
Total 2024 Caminos:	18 miles
Total All Caminos:	2018 miles
Lodging:	Marta's Gästehäus @ $ 65
Total Lodging:	$ 130
Planes:	$ 1300
Total Planes / Travel Insurance:	$ 1470
Buses / Trains / Taxis:	$ 9
Total Buses / Trains / Taxis:	$ 20
Food:	$ 32
Total Food:	$ 78

Weather and trail conditions : Cloudy all day and lots of intermittent drizzle. Temperature was in the mid 30s f.

For the most part concrete, although I did get a few patches of trail. All urbanized.

Meaningful Moment

I probably had about a dozen conversations in German today as I was walking the trail.

Most involved getting directions or figuring out where I was, but a few had seconds of personal connection.

With about an hour to go, I crossed the border from Berlin into Brandenburg State. I'll be spending the next few days in Brandenburg, and I'm hoping for a more rural, rustic kind of hike.

I think my favorite was talking with the young man in the tourist office in Teltow. It amounted to a conversation.

I just had a 5 minute telephone conversation all in German with someone who didn't speak English and arranged for a room for a night for Saturday. Yay!

At the end of the day, I went over to the main train station in search of food for tomorrow and supper for tonight. I failed miserably and all I found was a hot coffee and a blueberry cheesecake.

Hauptbahnhof (main train station)

In search of food but found cheesecake instead.

Random Thought of the Day

How dependent we are on technology. I have a paper folding map of the trail and a GPS trail loaded into my app on the phone.

The paper map is clumsy to handle while walking.

The app and GPS trail on my phone keeps crashing or malfunctioning.

By the second half of the hike I had come to rely more on the paper map and street signs than the GPS trail in my app.

Second thought. Almost all of today was through urbanized areas either downtown Berlin, the outer ring block house rows, followed by developments followed by the next town and the same pattern again.

There were a few nice sites and sometimes I got to walk along trails or parks, but it was a concrete kind of day.

The Japanese gardens were constructed from a gift by the Japanese people to the German people on the fall of the Berlin Wall. Cherry trees line the path for quite a distance. Since it was January, the trees were barren, but my imagination saw innumerable cherry blossoms surrounding me.

On the Road / Notable memories

***** Thinking process the night before.

Going to go for it and start hiking. Here's the plan :

Catch the subway U 5 line to Hönow and exit at Brandenburg gate.

Hike to Teltow, approximately 12 mi. ( That turned out to be a false expectation as it was much longer. )

Catch the rapid transit S 25 (Heningsdorf) or S 26 line (Bernau) back to Friedrichstrasse and transfer to the S 5,(or one of multiple) rapid transit lines, back to the main train station, and walk back to the hostel.

Then Friday morning, reverse the process. Catch the rapid transit to Friedrichstrasse and then transfer for the rapid transit train (S 25 or S 26) to Teltow and start walking from there to Saarmund.

****** The reality

Around 2 miles, shortly after crossing the canal, I saw my first homeless encampment. Some issues are universal and intractable.

Just short of mile 5, my gpx file in maps crashed. This is what I'm using to follow the trail. It's the only real-time feedback I have, since I couldn't find anything in Alltrails for the Via Imperii.

This was major, because I need the real time feedback. Although I have a paper map, it's just not as good as GPS tracking.

So I found a supermarket, because I had to reload the data, and I did not remember how, and I needed to get out of the rain. Anyway, it made for a rest stop.

Several times, while using the GPS map data, I ended up going off the trail because the data interpolated in between points. And when the points have some distance between them, it turns a trail into a straight line, thereby misleading the user.

By the time I made it into Teltow, it was just under 7 and 1/2 hours and 18 miles which far exceeded my expectations for the day. The math works out to a 2.5 mph pace for the entire day. That's not too shabby!

I am glad that I decided to remain at the hostel in Berlin, because I only carried my light backpack. Tomorrow I can carry the full backpack from Teltow to Saarmund which will be a shorter distance.