A day out in Britzer Garten

Part of the bridge at Britzer Garten where we saw a crab/lobstery -looking thing crawling in the grass at the edge . I couldn't be sure as there were too many people around poking it with their fingers.

One of the many mosaic things for the kids to enjoy hiding in.

Hamish is in the middle of acting out a little pirate story. Aaaaarrr!!

They even had a little mini-Oktoberfest going on. German expats - can you name the song ?

There were even owl and eagle displays!

I was totally impressed by the kazillion seats dotted around. 

I lost the kids in the maze. 5000 tiny sharp stones in my sandals and I'm running after nobody.

Some of my babies were really tired. Maclaren do triple buggies, right?

A very happy belated German Reunification Day to you! I hope you had a good one. We considered heading to the Brandenburg Gate on the bikes for a few hours or beer drinking, wandering, and pretzel eating, but as we'd been last year, and with the weather so good we thought we'd either head to the coast or visit Britzer Garten for the day. Much as the kids love the seaside, I couldn't really be bothered with the drive, so we decided to try our luck closer to home. We'd heard of Britzer Garten through some friends, as a great place to take kids as it has a little railway. And we'd all tried to go there, but it was incorrectly Googled and instead we went to Sudgelande (a park where there are old steam trains hidden in amongst the bushes and paths made from disused track. Ah, now, did I not post the photo of me doing my bit to revive silent movies??).

Anyway, this time we got the right place. It's at the Tempelhof side of Neukölln, in Berlin. And it's fantastic. There's just so much to do there. There are flower gardens and nice nature-y walks, and simply tons of things for the kids to play on. So much in fact that the kids could quite easily walk for miles and miles because around each corner there would be something else for them to play with, whether it was a swing hidden in amongst the trees, climbing bars, little houses and huts, mosaic elephants, sand and water play, it was the best park I have been to for having things for the kids to do on a walk.

Aside from that there were also animals that you can pat - goats, donkeys and sheep, and there was a display of birds that you couldn't pat. Owls and eagles and other things (must brush up on my ornathology really) that made squeaky noises. We also passed a boating lake with lots of (mostly grown ups) sailing remote controlled boats, which Hamish rather enjoyed. And as we were walking we heard a band playing and headed towards the noise where we discovered they were holding a little mini-Oktoberfest. It was really good fun.

Stevie was starting to wilt by this point and we decided to take a trip on the little train. You have to pay extra to go on the train (It was 3 Euros for S & I to get in to the park and it cost another 3 Euros for us all to go one stop on the train.) I'm not sure how much it is to go a full round trip, but we wanted to just get closer to the car park. In usual manner we got on the train going the wrong way and ended up at the furthest away point from our car that we could possibly be. So on the way home all my little darlings had a little snooze...