trips

HAMBURG, Germany--Sure, Miniatur Wunderland is the world's largest collection of model trains, but to describe it that way would do it a serious injustice. What it really is is a beyond-belief collection of fantastic dioramas depicting scenes from the Swiss and Austrian Alps, Germany, the United States, and Scandinavia throughout which run 900 trains on the more than eight miles of tracks.

I had planned to come here as part of Road Trip 2011, because I'd read that Miniatur Wunderland had recently added a giant scale model of a working airport. And when I looked into that, I … Read more

Boeing today said one of its 747-8 freighters will be the first commercial jetliner to do a transatlantic flight on "biologically derived fuel."

According to the aviation giant, Boeing's Keith Otsuka and Rick Braun, along with Sten Rossby of Cargolux, will pilot the new plane to the Paris Air Show on Monday using a 15 percent camelina-based biofuel mix. The remainder of the fuel will be traditional Jet-A kerosene.

In a press release, the company described camelina as a plant grown in Montana and processed by Honeywell, and said that the freighter doesn't require any modifications … Read more

BILLUND, Denmark--There are a lot of different Lego sets. There are pirate sets, Star Wars sets, city sets, space sets, and many more. But at the heart of it all, at the heart of a toy empire with many millions of passionate fans throughout the world, is the brick.

A single Lego brick is nothing special. But put two together and you can start to make things. Add another, and another, and the number of things you can make starts to go up exponentially. Let's say you had six standard four-by-two red bricks. With those pieces alone, there are … Read more

SCHWANGAU, Germany--Given that King Ludwig II of Bavaria built Neuschwanstein Castle as a place where he could get away from the public and the sycophants who wanted to be near him, he might well have shuddered at the notion that just weeks after his death, the incredible palace was opened up as a public museum.

Neuschwanstein, if you're not familiar with it, is one of the world's most fairytale castles. In fact, you've surely seen countless pictures of it, its picturesque towers and walls sitting gorgeously in the middle of an Alpine valley, a gorgeous German countryside … Read more

For long car rides with kids, nothing, but nothing, beats a portable DVD player. (OK, an iPad comes close, assuming you're willing and able to rip all your DVDs ahead of time--and pay $500+ for an iPad.)

If your minivan didn't come with a built-in player, try this: today only, 1 Sale A Day has the Haier PDVD9KIT portable DVD player for $59.99, plus $4.99 for shipping.

The player features a 9-inch wide screen that can swivel--which may not seem like a big deal, but believe me when I say it comes in handy--plus stereo speakers … Read more

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany--It's warming up in the Middle East, and as the mercury rises, so does the intensity of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that means the number of seriously injured American soldiers passing through here is also rising every day.

Ramstein is known as the U.S. military's gateway to Europe, since it's where most personnel touch down when deployed here, the Middle East, or Africa. It's also part of the Kaiserslauten Military Community, whose 54,000 U.S. citizens make up the world's largest concentration outside the United States. But it'… Read more

MUNICH, Germany--They all shared a medium: Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Alexander Calder, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and 12 others. But it wasn't canvas. In fact, it was the metal surfaces of a group of BMW cars, and together, for more than 35 years, they created one of the most unusual and unlikely collections of all time.

These are the BMW art cars, a group of 17 works by those world-famous artists and other leaders in the pop art movement. While most of the great works by these geniuses hang stationary on walls or stands around the world, … Read more

FRIEDRICHSHAFEN, Germany--It's one of the most famous photographs ever--the Hindenburg exploding on its mast, lives instantly lost, the romance of a modern way of travel forever tainted.

That is probably true nowhere more than this modest city on the northern shore of Lake Constance, a place where zeppelins were invented and the Hindenburg called home.

Of course, that disaster took place in 1937, but here in Friedrichshafen, the memory of that famous airship, and its many German cousins, lives on every day at the Zeppelin Museum, an homage to an age long before jumbo jets, when flying across the Atlantic meant three days, but three luxurious days for sure.

The Zeppelin Museum is part history lesson, part cheerleader. Visitors--about 250,000 a year these days--are treated both to an education in the origins of the zeppelin as an aircraft, and to a bit of a love affair with the Hindenburg and its famous predecessor, the Graf Zeppelin.… Read more

STUTTGART-ZUFFENHAUSEN, Germany--If you don't think a car museum can be a stunning work of art, you need to get yourself here and check out the Porsche Museum.

Being Porsche, I expected it to be interesting and full of beautiful cars, but I wasn't prepared for the scale and scope of the building itself, a giant architectural masterpiece by Vienna's Delugan Meissl Associated Architects that also happens to be artfully full of some of the most interesting and important cars in the company's storied history.

If you were in Stuttgart before 2009 and visited the Porsche Museum, … Read more