25. September 2013 3 min read

Driving to Berlin and Berlin marathon visit

It was early morning in Ljubljana when I have started to pick up my team mates from roller speed skating team. We were about to start our journey to race in Worlds (or at least Europe) biggest inline roller speed skating races. With over 6800 people applied in 2013 this was bound to be a great adventure.
We started looking at airplane tickets from Zagreb to Berlin (only direct flight from close enough airports) in January and air fares per person were around 126 EUR. It was not really expensive but we have thought that prices will drop even more. They never did. On end of August, when prices rose to 170 EUR we have decided to go with car. It is almost exactly 1000 km from Ljubljana to Berlin and mostly on great German Autobahn. Also only major expenses were tunnels and Austrian Vignette - which all together costed us around 40 EUR. We again took Toyota Yaris, which only uses around 4 L/100km which meant overall travel costs were around 200 EUR. Not so much for 4 persons especially since we had a Thule case on roof.
So, it was early morning and our journey took us through Karavanke Tunnel, Katzberg up to Salzburg, where we fueled our tank (Austria has cheapest petrol prices on this journey). One tank was enough to reach Berlin. We made a stop in Ingolstadt Shopping Village where they have a lot of great outlet shops with very nice discounts. Things we bought here already made our trip worth it. After the shopping spree and short meal we continued our journey on Autobahn 9 from Munich through Nurnberg and to Berlin. We arrived in Berlin in late afternoon and checked into apartment in Kurfursterdamm, which we reserved over Only apartments. It was really big, with working WiFi (and internet) and the owner thought of everything (she even provided shopping basket and washing machine detergent tablets). We were surprised but tired and went to sleep.
Read about next day of our adventure here.