A great weekend break

Where were you for Sunday lunch? I found myself, quite unexpectedly, on the border between the old East Germany and Poland. A charming restaurant, and one of the best meals I’ve had in ages, for about a quarter of the price one would pay at home.The weekend had started badly: an inspection trip to add a few more hotels to the Berlin section of this website, for which I suggested to my husband that he choose the hotel we stayed in on Friday night. We could have gone anywhere, including the slew of five star properties that Berlin now offers. But the husband made a mistake, got a couple of names muddled up and booked a student hostel! We were lucky…we had a room to ourselves instead of a dormitory, but we shared the (very clean) bathroom and the bare walls and metal wardrobe of our room didn’t particularly help my husband’s prospects of not being clubbed to death by his wife with one of the large, German style pillows! But it wasn’t all bad….not at all: it was set in an atmospheric pre-war factory in the funky, ‘real Berlin’ district of Kreuzberg and actually makes a great budget address, so much so that we are pleased to included it on the website: Die Fabrik.The next day, a great surprise in store. We headed out of Berlin for an hour and a half for the peaceful, little visited lake district of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Read about the very special place we found on my next post….   Before heading back to Berlin Tegel airport on Sunday we drove north to another place we’d heard about (we were researching for our Charming Small Hotel Guide to Germany as well as for Hotel Guru) which turned out to be a low key hotel in a farmyard setting…with the great restaurant. If you find yourself up there, its called Rittergut Bomitz, in the village of Bomitz. A three mile track across fields takes you there. A West German couple with a background in hotels are bringing it up to speed. More work needs to be done to the bedrooms, but the restaurant…. already superb.