In Germany for the 14th time of my life, and I do not seem to tire of it at all. Everytime I go to a new city for the year, I say to myself: "This is the best city in Germany!" State-of-the-art shopping, sights and autobahns. In 2008 we visited the North Sea Coast and experienced the lowtide. I could actually stand on the seabed with the water many kilometres away from me. Munich and Berlin were cities in which we were shopping a great deal, probably because they have the best shops in the whole of Germany. One of the highlights 2008 was Nuremberg. We had not planned to visit the city, but we decided on the spur of the moment to take the exit leading there, and we stayed there for over 5 hours.

On 3 July 2008 we managed to have seen all 82 German cities with over 100,000 inhabitants, as we visited Salzgitter as the last one. It took us almost 7 years to do so, as we started on 12 July 2001 with Dresden. At the beginning we did not think about seeing all cities, but I happened to keep track of them in a book that I had bought. In 2006 we realised that there were only a few left, so we thought: why not go for all of them in the future? German cities are almost always fun and offer a lot to see and do. Due to the way we had planned the routes in 2006 and 2007 it was not possible to make it before 2008. Wikipedia has the complete list of cities in English.

Other highlights were in other countries, for example Bern and the Matterhorn at Zermatt. Prague in the Czech Republic was not too bad, either. In 2001 we could only shop crystal, but this year they had very good shops to cater for all tastes.