[Rick Lee]

I went to Mittelbau-Dora last May. It's actually a little farther off the A38 than it looks. You have to drive all the way through Nordhausen to get to it, but that's not a bad town to drive through either. It definitely has that old DDR vibe to it, if you know what I mean. The Greek place on the main street there is a good lunch spot.

Mittelbau-Dora isn't much to look at unless you take the tour of the tunnels. Bring a jacket. It will be chilly in there and it'll take longer to get through than you'll be able to stand without a jacket. IIRC, it's a steady 8-10 deg. C at all times.

As long as you're taking that hwy, there's some other good stuff about an hour east. Eisleben, birthplace of Martin Luther is one of the exits. Querfurt, IIRC, is the next exit and has a pretty cool castle. Obhausen is a tiny village you can drive through to get to Querfurt. It's my favorite place in the world and I stayed with a family there for a week during the summer before the Berlin Wall fell. Great people there.

Looks like Leipzig and Dresden are on that route too. So much to see there and such a shame to pass it all by. There's also a Stasi prison in Halle, which you'll be passing right by, called Rote Ochse. I was there in 2002 when they were renovating it to make it into a museum. Some of the workers there let me walk around the construction site and go see a few of the cells that had not been touched since back in the day. If you were ever in the DDR, it had such a unique smell everywhere and those prison cells still had it. It's like wet wood and cheap leather with some two stroke engine exhaust mixed in. Looks like Bautzen is also right off the hwy. past Dresden.

I really want to go to Wroclaw too, the old Breslau. My friend in Obhausen, since passed away, was from there back when it was Silesia, part of Germany. There's an amazing, totally unwritten history about the expulsion of Germans from those territories right after WWII.