We had a much later start today, then headed over to the Schnell bakery opposite the hotel. We both had an apple crumble puff pastry, and a warm drink. Although Carmen had told them Earl grey for me, they’d put my order down as a coffee, and insisted that’s what we’d asked for. They did however sort it, but they weren’t happy about it.

Today’s outing was to Spandau Citadel, which was the familiar U12 line to Bismarckstraße, and from there the U7 the rest of the way to Zitadelle. It’s then only a ten minute walk from the station to the entrance, where some swans were nesting in the moat. Our journey there did of course include jokes about the 1980s band, Spandau Ballet, of which I only knew the track ‘Gold’.

The entrance for this fort is €4.50 per adult, and includes access to he gallery (which we didn’t bother with), and a room filled with canons and artillery. We started off with some stairs to the side of the entrance that led into a museum filled with details about the citadel’s place in the Napoleonic War, and then later the Second World War.

The original fortress was built in 1157, but in the mid-1500s it was redesigned in an Italian style. It seems the Julius Tower already existed at that point, although its castellations were added in 1838. During the Napoleonic War it had been surrendered to the French without a shot being fired, just as it was during the Battle of Berlin after the Soviets laid siege to the fort. In 1935, the Army's Gas Protection Laboratory, and they worked own developing nerve gas after the discovery of Tabun.

Behind a curtain in the museum there’s apparently some bats, but I’m pretty sure they were either fake, or stuffed. To the side of this is a door that leads out onto part of the wall, and some steps to the Julius Tower which we decided to go into. In the centre of the room are some narrow stairs that corkscrew up onto another floor, and from that you can then see stairs that wind around the circular wall of the room all the way to the top where there’s then some streps straight across the centre to a door that leads out onto the roof of the tower.

I did wonder if Carmen would be okay going up there, but she did it without problem, and from the top we got a good view of Spandau, and the surrounding areas. A person who’d gone up there before us pointed out a couple of the buildings, and then commented that it’s always windy in Berlin, but not so much here. Shortly after that the wind picked up, and it started to feel cooler.

We explored some more of the citadel, and could feel the half marathon in our legs when going up yet more stairs. A lot of the buildings inside the citadel were not open to the public, or at least, were not at the time. We decided not to bother with the gallery, but had a look inside the room filled with artillery and canons.

Once done, we then headed to Spandau, and found our way to St. Marien am Behnitz church, which is one of the oldest in the area, just as the nearby Kolk is one of the oldest settled areas here.

The town looked like it could easily have been anywhere with its cobbled streets and familiar-looking shops. We got on the underground at the end of the line, and took it all the way back to Richard-Wagner Platz with a quick photo as we passed through Paulsternstraße due to the pillars that were designed by Rainer G. Rümmler to look like trees.

When we left the underground behind I kept an eye out for somewhere to have lunch, but it wasn’t until we were almost at the Charlottenburg Palace that we looked properly, and decided to eat at Back Time. I had a ham and cheese toasty for lunch, and started to think that this may have been where I’d had lunch in 2009 as well. I remembered that too was on a corner with a view of the palace, and I’d sat in the window then too. At least this time the palace wouldn’t be closed for refurbishment.

We crossed the road to the palace, and waited to try and get photographs of the front without anyone in the way. This proved to be difficult, and instead we had to get creative with angles instead, and get the timing right. We then got ahead of the people wandering around, hoping to get inside before the crowed. A board had been left out in the courtyard pointing us at the door for the ticket office. I pulled on the door, but it didn’t move. I looked at the door, and tried again, but it still wouldn’t open.

I wondered if maybe they close for lunch or something like that, so checked if the board said anything else, and then saw they close on Mondays. It was disappointing to not look around inside yet again, but what made this worse was that I had actually done the research already, and knew it was closed on Mondays and thought it’d be somewhere for Saturday after the race expo. I’d just forgotten about it.

We then walked to the Sophie-Charlotte-Platz station, and took the U12 all the way back to Wittenbergplatz so we could relax in the hotel for the remainder of the afternoon. I left Carmen in charge of deciding where she wanted to eat for our last proper meal.

When the time came, we walked to Cao Cao, the Vietnamese place we’d eaten at on the first evening. There wasn’t much on the menu for me to choose from that didn’t contain onion or was something different enough from what I’d already had, but I went for Miến Xào with beef. If it hadn’t been for my plan to do an 8 mile run in the morning, I would likely have risked one of the dishes with onion in. It was an okay meal I thought, maybe not quite as nice as the first one there, but was still filling.

We thought we’d walk for a while after, so wandered in the direction of the zoo, and entered Tiergarten from the side of that. There were so many insects flying around as we walked along the canal, I did wonder if we’d get bitten. When we neared the victory column we then headed back to the hotel via the supermarket.