We arrived in Montreal, but this journey isn't over yet.  We are driving across Canada, stopping in Banff and then down through Idaho and into California for another summer in Lake Tahoe. 

Our car was loaded on the ship and we are now sailing on a real cruise ship home.  We aren't on the top deck and there are no dinners with the captain as there were on the freighter coming over, but we will be in Montreal on the 16th of May. 

We are in Amsterdam again.  But now it is almost 8 months after the start of this amazing adventure and we will soon be on our way home. 

This afternoon we visited the Reichstag (the parliament building during the 3rd Reich) now in bombed ruins, the Hansa Quarter of ultramodern apartments and churches, Corbusiers House and the Olympic Stadium.  We drove to the French sector and along the wall there.  The wall itself was erected strangely.  It doesn't run along the streets but winds in and out between houses and cuts across the streets.  It varies in height, has cut glass pieces embedded on end in top, plus barbed wire.  Behind the wall are two more barbed wire fences.  They lean outward to make climbing over even harder.  In between fences and wall are rolls of tangled wire about four feet deep, besides that, every few yards is a communist soldier on foot or in a watch tower busy with binoculars and armed with machine guns.
The houses right on the border in town are now all bricked up and empty except for a few peepholes out ex-windows for guards.  They used to have a lot of people make it as far as these houses and jump out the windows to land in the street on the western side so they are now bricked in.  You can walk along the wall and see wooden barbed wire crosses and flower wreaths erected on sidewalks at spots where eastern escapees were shot coming over wall or were killed jumping out of windows.  You can climb up on stands with French soldiers on our side and look over the wall and see all the barbed wire and soldiers only three feet away.
At dusk we drove to Berlin's outer sections - beautiful residential areas, woods, summer beer pavilions, but sooner or later on every road we'd run into that barbed wire, barricades and soldier guarded borders.  It's sad to see two beautiful homes in the country with the fence running between them, a wood tower, Communist and gun ready to shoot and kill the one on the east if he so much as makes a move towards his neighbor in the west.
We stopped at a little Gasthof for some white beer and spent three hours playing a slot machine type game and talking to all the people.  One man we talked to a long time escaped from the the east.  His family is there.  He can't see them but he has put his faith in a Dutch prophet who says in 1967 Berlin will be reunited.  We got an idea of how life in Berlin is from talking to the people.  Most seem to have the "live while we can" attitude.  They are a courageous people here.  It is hard to begin to write what we feel.  It can best be summed up by saying that one never realizes what freedom is until one sees a place where freedom isn't.  Freedom is certainly our most valuable possession. 

We left early for Berlin.  It is a four hour drive behind the iron curtain to get to Berlin right.  We were checked by about about 6 different guards and gates and it took us over an hour of red tape to get over the border.  It cost the four of us and the car $16.  They really check you and harass you enough to make it irritating to even to in.  They are deliberately annoying to you at borders.  They thoroughly checked the car, under seats, in truck, etc. and have a device a mirror, on wheels they roll up under the car to check underneath.  We were somewhat aghast though when we realized that, while one was questioning us, another had wheeled his mirror into good position to look up our skirts.  The whole border is plastered with banners, pictures, etc. advertising the “German Democratic Republic”. 

We drove on four hours to Berlin, Western Sector,  We spent the afternoon looking along Kurfurstendam.  Berlin is all new and modern “5th Avenue” shops, movies, sidewalk cafes, etc., along a quite elegant wide boulevard built with  U.S.dollars.   We stopped in a sidewalk café for a Berlin specialty – Berliner Weissmit Himbeer (white beer with a fruit syrup foamed into it).  Tastes sort of like strawberry champagne.

We visited the Kaiser Wilheim Mrmorial Church, an ultramodern simple steel and glass octagonal and bell tower built around the ancient gothic styled, bombed and shattered remains of the old church.  Only the shell of the old tower remains, new church surrounds it.  Also remaining is one statue a huge marble Christ, which now wears the unknown artwork of someone scrounging in the rubble during the bombing.  A red face and a red hammer and sickle across the robe.  The Church is very impressive. 

We drove to see the Brandenbeurger Ror (Gate) from our side (you can drive up to it but can’t get out) and past the huge Russian Monument with tanks and soldiers guarding it.  You can view it from behind a large expanse of rolled and tangled barbed wire fence.  We saw the West Sectors Victory Column, 215 feet high with a gold winged victory on top, ate currywurst for dinner , then went to the hostels.  Two downtown were full so we had to go to one way out in the sticks on the edge of Western Sector – in the forest.  We figured this would happen since in Germany cars are forbidden in hostels.  This means we usually park around the corner.  Lat night we parked about 100 meters down the road and walked back to the hostel.