Frozen Water Wheel

We left Winterberg in late afternoon after a light snack. On the way we saw this frozen water wheel - an amazing sight with the salactities and salagmites forming from top and bottom. The temperature here are always subzero and even below minus 10 Deg. C at night, so water gets easily frozen except the one flowing in the stream.

We headed southward to Aachen to stay overnight there. The traffic was quite bad. It took nearly 3 hours to reach our hotel. One thing that is good about Germany is the motorways or known as autobahns here. This is one of the legacies left by Hilter who came up with a big project to keep the people employed during the recession years in the 1930's. At that time the motorway was already designed to cater for up to a top speed of 160 km/h while the curves up to 150 km/h. The big project was also to improved the country's infrastructure to help with the economic recovery effort.

Nowadays German's autobahns are a lot more modern and smoother to drive. It is probably the only country in the world that does not have speed limit on some of its motorways. We restraint ourselves with the speed with our rental car. Even cruising at 120km/hr, we were by far amongst the slowest on the road. Most people were crusing at much higher speed. No wonder the Germans are great car manufacturers, buying a beamer or a merc is only worthwhile if you can drive like those in these autobahns.

One thing about the German's motorways is the lack of street lightings. Unlike in Holland where virtually every motorways are lighted, the high amount of traffics in Germany seems to provide sufficient lightings from the cars and make additional street lightings redundant. It must have saved quite a lot in terms of cost and maintainance as well. Just imagine that there are over 12,000 km of motorways in total in Germany.