When I discovered that Germany's first geocache was fairly close to Berlin and that I could catch a train to within about 4Km of it, I decided to go and find it.
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Aha, the cache itself. If the sand is looking a little distrubed, that's because I dug most of it before noticing 'GEOCACHING' lightly scratched in the paint on the pole nearest the cache itself. D'Oh! Note the Coca-Cola CD holder from the cache in Lane Cove (November 7). By the time this photo was taken, I had already eaten with lunch the green-pepper dip that I found in this cache.
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Berlin sits in an enormous plateau that covers much of Northern Germany. I had noticed that Berlin's streets were pretty flat, but out here you can really see just how flat it is. The city of Berlin is a state in its own right, but it happens to be entirely surrounded by another state: Brandenburg. Until the end of 1989, the easten half of Berlin and all of Brandenburg were well inside what was then East Germany. As a result, the entire area is unpopulated and undeveloped; about all that's out here is farmland and forest, for hundreds of Km in some directions. Apparently this is unusual in (western) Europe.