This weekend we visited Berlin, to attend the Berlin giga event. We left home after work on Thursday, and spent the entire Friday and Saturday in Berlin, before heading back home again on Sunday.
Very nice flying weather
The weather along the way down was amazing, and we had two very nice flights before we landed in foggy weather at Berlin Tegel.
After checking in at the hotel, right outside Alexanderplatz, we went outside to find a couple caches – and something to eat.
Early up
After a couple hours sleep, we were ready for breakfast shortly after 6 am, and we left the hotel before 7. One of our goals was to find as many of the virtual caches in Berlin as possible.
We started by taking the U-Bahn towards Brandenburger Tor, but stopping a bit early to be able to grab some caches along the way. Almost no muggles out this early – which was perfect!
We’re not the only geocachers in Berlin this weekend
We didn’t get very far before we started meeting other random cachers at the caches – one of the things we really like about attending large events. A bit further down the street, we met Annie from Geocaching HQ. And without her help, we never would have found GC2TT8Y Französischer Dom.
We had fun caching with Annie, and also got to witness a (peaceful) demonstration when we got back to Alexanderplatz.
After finding some more caches with Annie, we continued on our own to find a multi and the last virtuals of the day. We didn’t understand anything of the multi, even though it had an English description. But with some help from google, and random cachers near GZ, we still managed to find it.
We found the last of the virtuals on the plan, for the day, and took the U-Bahn back to Alexanderplatz. We ended the day with a visit to the TV tower. Our feet were really hurting after a very long day – more than 44 000 steps, and around 30 kilometers!
The big day
After a couple hours sleep, we once again got up early. We had one more virtual to find along the way to the event.
For some reason, the public transport system did not work very well this day. Lots of delays, cancellations and even some closed stops/routes. But we managed to find alternative routes, and still got to the event location well in time before the official start.
We’ve attended many large events, but we’ve never experienced a check-in/swag pickup that was as effective as here! We had all we needed before we even managed to find the queue. Shortly after, we were let into the event location – and this really was the perfect location for this event!
Lots of space, both inside and outside. Even though we were thousands of people here, it still felt like we had plenty of space to move around. The only thing we missed, was English translation of the welcome speech. But all in all, this was a very well organized giga event! The best (of three) we’ve been to!
Tempelhof
The second goal for the day, was to find the two virtual caches at the old Tempelhof airport. The old airport, which is now a park, turned out to be so awesome – that we ended up spending the rest of the day there.
We rented bikes (which we later switched out with electric bikes), and had lots of fun just finding the caches around the airport. The sun was shining, and this was a really nice place to spend the rest of the day!
Time to find something to eat
We were getting hungry, so we decided to find something to eat once we got back to Alexanderplatz. The first place we stopped at didn’t take cards (you need to join the rest of the world in the 21st century, Germany), but the second place did! We found an empty table, and sat down to eat. A couple minutes later, we noticed a couple familiar faces – it was sandra+thorsten that sat down at the table next to us! We couldn’t have ended the already perfect day any better than this! It was so nice meeting you again!
Time to head home
We didn’t have anything planned for Sunday, other than getting up early enough to have time for breakfast before we headed towards the airport. We ordered an uber, which was there literally seconds later.
Tegel have to be one of the strangest airports we’ve flown from, but it did the job, and we made it out of there safely.
Two short flights later, in awesome flying weather, we arrived back home – in the homeland of the Viking kings.
Curious about which caches we found? You can see all of them in our trip report on cachetur.no, which you can find here.
Pictures
