Berlin to Dresden - Side trip to Brand

I am so very annoyed with Blogger. They had a massive outage due to putting up buggy code. They lost yesterday's post from the Berlin Museum of the Berlin Wall, which I thought was one of my better efforts. I'm going to wait until tomorrow to see if it comes back, if not I'll redo part of it. (Note from AM. the original post eventually came back and has been placed in the correct time slot of the vacation chronicles.)
Today we drove from Berlin to Brand to see an old Russian airbase where Mig-27s were based. It's unbelievably huge, there are hard shelters and taxi ways to the main runway everywhere. But you look at the following picture and say to yourself, what the heck? The is the hangar that was built for the Cargo Lifter, a dirigible to haul big heavy stuff. They built the hangar in the late 90s after the Russians left in 1994, but went bankrupt in 2002. So, what do you do with an empty dirigible hangar? Why you build a water park called Tropical Islands and bus people into it for a day of fun in the hangar. Is it not an amazing thing to see?

Even though unification was in 1990, the Russians did not leave until around1994. I did not know this until going to Germany. It took them awhile to pack up their stuff and for their government, which was broke by that time, to scrape up enough money to bring them back.
These are two of the hard shelters.

Hard shelter with one door closed.

Sheep.

Look at the runway, you can just about see the curvature of the earth.

Then we went and looked at the old Russian barracks for the airmen stationed at the base.

The blue paint is peeling off an interior wall. The roofs are all gone, we wondered if the local citizens had salvaged the roofs for their own homes.

There is a campground for Tropical Islands.

Here is the campground store. What KOA can claim to have a location in an old hard shelter?

Food.

I had to take a second look at these packages to figure out what they were. They're lady's sanitary products, and the pictures do not accurately describe what's in the package.

This is a small town near the base, I think it was Halbe. This is a Russian memorial to something, for the life of me I do not understand why the townspeople allow it to stand.


This is Markisch Buchholz. It's a lovely little village. We saw a man riding his bike carrying a scythe. I wish I could have gotten a picture of him.



War dead - 1945.


So, now we are in Dresden. We have a much better room than we did in Berlin. Yay!