Abandoned motorway

I got to cycle legally on a motorway!

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It's where the Berlin-Brandenburg border for some reason loops back on itself for a short stretch, at a place called Albrecht's Tar Kiln. The East German authorities moved a stretch of the motorway half a mile to the east, as otherwise it crossed into West Berlin then back into East Germany, then back into West Berlin again, which made for a confusion of checkpoints. There's nothing left of it now bar a broad path through the forest (and a marker giving information about someone who was killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall there), but the bridge remains. (The lane markings indicate that the left-hand lane is for cars, the right-hand for buses and HGVs (I think) at the border checkpoint.)

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Incidentally, the balls of vegetation you can see in a couple of my photos on the otherwise leafless trees (I took these photos on 1 March) are mistletoe; it's really very common here. First, here's what the former motorway looks like away from the bridge:

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The course of the Wall ignored most of the back-and-forth convolutions of the border. To the east of this was the killing strip, where the East Germans cut down all the trees to make it impossible for anyone to approach the wall without being seen. This is what it looks like there today:

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As you can see, the forest is beginning to reestablish itself there, but obviously there are no trees under thirty-one years of age.

A relic of the border post:

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The route of the wall is dotted with memorials to those who died trying to cross the Wall—or not, as in the example from this location:

In the summer of 1962, the 42-year-old West Berlin resident Hermann Döbler was shot dead near the old border crossing when his sports boat entered East German border waters in the Teltow Canal. His female companion was badly wounded and permanently disabled. Although the boat had already turned back, the East German border guards deliberately fired aimed shots at its occupants.