Cora’s Adventures at the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe Convention in Neuss or the Six Hundred Kilometer Roundtrip, Part 1: The Trip Out

Last Saturday, I attended the 2024 Los Amigos Masters of the Universe fan convention. There are two big Masters of the Universe conventions in Germany, Grayskull Con and Los Amigos, plus at least two general toy cons which attract a lot of Masters of Universe fans and collectors.

Last year, I considered going to one or more of those cons. However, there was one problem or rather two, a)  I live in North Germany and most German cons, whether general SFF or specialty cons, are much further south and quite far away, and b) I had sick parents at home and/or in hospital and didn’t really want to leave them alone. Since point b) is no longer an issue, there was only point a) to consider.

Until last year, the Los Amigos convention used to take place in Hanau near Frankfurt, which is a four and a half hour drive away (or a one hour flight to Frankfurt and then a train ride to Hanau). However, for 2024 the convention relocated to Neuss, a city in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, which is somewhat closer, though still roughly three hundred kilometers away, which means a three to three and a half hour drive, depending on traffic conditions.

Now I have done long road trips before, but for those trips I’ve always had a co-driver, my Dad, my Mom, when she was still driving, or a friend. However, I’ve never done a road trip this long on my own. And while I was confident that I could handle three hundred kilometers – I think the maximum I have driven on my own in a day was four hundred kilometers – I wasn’t sure whether I could handle driving three hundred kilometres back on the same day. And since the con was in Neuss, that meant braving the traffic nightmare that is the Ruhrgebiet (even though Neuss isn’t officially part of the Ruhrgebiet, but just south of it).

So I was dithering whether to go or not until the weekened before the con. Then I decided to go and promised myself to take a break whenever I felt like it, even if that meant stopping at every service station along the way for a coffee. I also decided to pack an overnight bag and just check in at a hotel somewhere, if I was too tired to make it back home.

Highway A1

The con was set to open at ten AM. So on Saturday morning, I got up at half past five and drove off at six AM. The sun was already up – sunrise is at 5:30 AM currently – but it was very foggy outside. Much of the route followed highway A1, which is practical, because highway A1 passes by my home with the two nearest exits, Brinkum and Groß Mackenstedt a.k.a. Delmenhorst Ost, both roughly five or six kilometres away.

There are other highways nearby like the A27 or the A28 and A281, both of which were added/expanded in the 1990s. But growing up where I did, A1 was usually what people meant when we talked about “the Autobahn”. Highway A1 was also a gateway to adventure, because this was where every longer distance trip started, by driving onto the A1.

When I was a teenager, my best friend Dagmar and I would sometimes take our bikes to the highway bridge at Groß Mackenstedt, where an agricultural service road crosses the A1. Only locals know this road and this bridge and there’s never a lot of traffic there, so we would just hang out on the bridge and watch the cars rush by below. And we’d talk about how once we got our driver’s licences and could acquire or borrow a car, we’d just drive down highway A1 as far south (north wasn’t that exciting) as it would go. Though we weren’t entirely sure where highway A1 actually went.

“Osnabrück”, I said, because that’s what the sign on the southbound entry ramp said (the northbound direction is Hamburg).

“And then?”

“Münster.”

“And then?”

“I’m not sure. I think Cologne. There’s a sign.”

Highway A1 does indeed go to Cologne, though it passes by Dortmund first, which my teen self must have missed, even though Dortmund as a major city is listed on the distance signs by the roadside. As teenagers we assumed that highway A1 would eventually go to Bavaria and then cross into Austria and finally Italy all the way to the Mediterranean Sea (and yes, Dagmar and I were totally planning to drive all the way), but where highway A1 really goes is Saarbrücken, where is peters out just before the French border (The northern terminus is Heiligenhafen on the Baltic Sea). And yes, I have done the whole trip.

That said, while I know all the exits and service stations until a little after Osnabrück, I get somewhat fuzzy about what comes afterwards and no longer recognise the names of many exits and service stations.

On Saturday morning, by the time I got to Wildeshausen service station, my body felt a little stiff and some tiredness from last night was still lingering. And Wildeshausen isn’t very far away at all, only about thirty kilometers, so I started feeling doubtful about the whole adventure. If I felt creaky and a little tired after thirty kilometers, how could I possibly handle three hundred? Nonetheless, I decided to drive on to service station Dammer Berge, about a hundred kilometers from home, since I’d planned to stop there for breakfast anyway. Then I would reassess if I felt up for the rest of the trip. If not, I’d just turn around and go home.

Dammer Berge

As for why I wanted to stop for breakfast at Dammer Berge, service station Dammer Berge is special, because it is a bridge restaurant, which spans highway A1. Bridge restaurants aren’t that uncommon in Europe – Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands have several – but in Germany, there are only are two bridge restaurants, both built in the late 1960s. The building costs were too high, so they just returned to building two unremarkable service stations on each side of the highway instead. Here is some more background information about the unique structure of service station Dammer Berge and that it is much beloved by those who drive past it.

A look at the Dammer Berge bridge restaurant from the parking lot. The fence is intended to prevent people from wandering or tumbling onto the highway below.

Since Dammer Berge is fairly close to home, you pass it pretty much every time you drive along the A1 in southbound direction. Therefore, it’s very much a landmark for many people in the region. But even though I’d driven underneath the striking bridge restaurant of Dammer Berge lots of times, I’d never actually been inside, because it’s so close to home that there was never any need to pee or refuel the car or stop for food here. However, I always wanted to see what the bridge restaurant actually looks like inside.

And this is what the Dammer Berge bridge restaurant looks like on the inside. Sadly, next to nothing of the late 1960s interior remains except possibly the iconic artichoke lamp, having been replaced by bland modern furnishings with all the charme of a McDonald’s.

To be fair, my parents would have stopped and let me take a look, if I’d ever told them that I wanted to see what Dammer Berge looks like inside. However, I never did until a few years ago, when I chanced to mention to Dad that I always wanted to visit the bridge restaurant. Dad immediately offered to stop and let me take a look, but I said, “It’s almost 8 PM and we still have an hour to drive, so let’s do it some other time.” Alas, some other time never happened until Saturday.

That said, the actual Dammer Berge experience was rather underwhelming. Because it was still very early, around 7 AM, much of the restaurant area, including the coffee bar, wasn’t open yet. And even though I paid at the counter, I had to get my coffee from a machine, which had been cleaned very shortly before, so my latte tasted of soap. The slice of apple pie I planned to have for breakfast was covered in gloopy glaze, to which I’m allergic, so I couldn’t even eat most of it. At least the view was as good as expected.

The view from service station Dammer Berge down on highway A1. Since it was 7 AM on a Saturday morning, the highway wasn’t very busy yet. Also note the massive construction work going on to expand the highway from four to six lanes to accomodate the high amount of traffic.

In addition to its landmark bridge restaurant and the usual gas station, service station Dammer Berge also has an highway chapel. Highway chapels are a German oddity. Inspired by the roadside shrines and chapels found in Catholic parts of Germany from the Middle Ages until today, the churches started setting up chapels and churches at service stations along the Autobahnen from the 1950s on. Some of these were existing village churches which were incorporated into the Autobahn network, others were newly built.  For more about Autobahn churches and chapels, see here and here.

The Dammer Berge Autobahn chapel is one of those that were newly built for this purpose. It was constructed in 1970, a year after the bridge restaurant was finished, and is an interesting Brutalist building. In fact, the most interesting Brutalist buildings are often churches.

Autobahn chapel Dammer Berge. This was apparently the first ecumenic Autobahn chapel. Previous chapels were either Catholic or Lutheran.

Onwards through the Ruhrgebiet

In spite of the underwhelming culinary experience, my stop at Dammer Berge had revigorated me, since even soapy coffee still contains caffeine. So I got back into my car and drove onwards towards Neuss.

At around this point, the landscape gradually gets more hilly. It’s not as pronounced at at Porta Westfalica, where you suddenly have mountains (well, by North German standards they are) jutting out from flat land, but it’s definitely notable. In fact, Dammer Berge literally means “Damme Mountains” (though they’re more hills, since the highest peak of the Damme mountains only reaches 146 m above sea level). Shortly thereafter, you get the Wiehen Mountains (again, they’re more like hills) and the Teutoburg Forest. You also pass Osnabrück.

This is also the point where my knowledge of the route gets a little fuzzy and where I no longer necessarily recognise the names of the exits and towns. Once I passed Münster, I was no longer familiar with the route at all. The highway continues to pass through fields, hills and forests, until you reach Kamener Kreuz, a cloverleaf junction which is one of the oldest highway junctions in Germany (construction began in 1937) and also one of the most famous. Kamener Kreuz also marks the beginning of the Ruhrgebiet.

Kamener Kreuz also offers one of the more interesting sights along the route, namely the ADAC monument dedicated to the German road rescue and aid service ADAC. The monument stands on top of a hill and consists of six angel figures (the ADAC aid vehicles and tow trucks are often called “yellow angels” due to their bright yellow colour) holding aloft a genuine decommissioned ADAC rescue helicopter. It’s a striking monument, but also a weird one, because it looks as if the angels captured a wild helicopter and are about to sacrifice it to some eldritch god.

Interchanges and junctions become a lot more frequent after Kamener Kreuz until seemingly every second or third exit is actually a junction. The Ruhrgebiet may long have lost its industral powerhouse status (and in fact the old coal and steel industry was already dying, when I was a kid), but it’s still one of the most densely populated areas in Germany and western Europe in general. Ten million people live in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region – that’s roughly one eighth of the total German population.

Because there are so many people crammed into a fairly small area, the Ruhrgebiet and the wider Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region is characterised by cities bleeding into each other to form what’s actually one megacity, even though all the cities are nominally independent entities. Indeed, there are proposals to combine all the different cities of the Ruhrgebiet into one megacity named Ruhrstadt. And because the Ruhrgebiet has so many people and cities, it also has a lot of highways and junctions and a lot of traffic, particularly at rush hour.

The highways network here is very confusing. Driving through the Ruhrgebiet was always an unpleasant experience, especially in the pre-GPS era, because the chances of accidentally taking the wrong exit or junction were so high. Even today, it’s still confusing to some degree. One of the many highways through the Ruhrgebiet was closed over the weekend for construction work, which sometimes happens, e.g. when they want to tear down a bridge or something. My route never even touched upon that highway, yet I passed plenty of signs announcing in scary flashing red letters “Vollsperrung” (full closure). When I saw the first of those signs, I thought that it was actually the A1 which was closed and not some other highway.

Shortly after Kamener Kreuz, the A1 passes Dortmund, one of the biggest cities along the route (and one of the biggest in the Ruhrgebiet). Though you wouldn’t know it from the highway, because the A1 passes Dortmund in a wide arc. Around this time, I felt pressure in my bladder, so I stopped once more for a toilet break at Lichtendorf service station. That’s another thing I like about solo drives, that I can stop for a toilet break whenever I want to. When I was a kid, my parents would always yell at me, when I needed to go to the toilet, so I suppressed the urge for as long as I could, which generally isn’t a great idea. Ironically, as my parents aged, they were the ones who needed toilet breaks a lot more often than I did.

Next came the city of Hagen, which is more interesting, because you can see the ruins of Volmarstein Castle, the ruins of Hohensyburg Castle as well as a massive monument to Emperor Wilhelm I looming on top of mountains (because by this point, you are driving through actual mountains) above the Ruhr valley. I wouldn’t mind further exploring this area at all, though I’ll probably visit the Emperor Wilhelm I monument in Porta Westfalica first, because that’s closer to home. The Second German Empire may not have lasted all that long (from 1871 to 1918), but it had a thing for putting massive monuments on top of mountains. The mountains around Hagen have a whopping five massive 19th century monuments, respectively dedicated to Emperor Wilhelm I, Emperor Friedrich III (who ruled for a whopping ninety days before succumbing to cancer, but generated a surprising number of monuments for someone whose barely outlasted the proverbial lettuce), Freiherr von Stein (a nobleman best remembered because Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had an affair with his wife), Otto von Bismarck and Eugen Richter, a local politician who was a vehement opponent of Bismarck.

Highway A46

Then I reached Wuppertal, another city I’d love to explore in detail one day because of its unique steampunky suspension railway, and it was time to leave the broad and comfortable highway A1 for the much narrower and less pleasant highway A46. Everything about highway A46 felt old to the point that I wondered whether it was one of the original Weimar era/Third Reich highways (no, Hitler did not invent the Autobahnen. They were a Weimar Republic era project he took over). It’s not – turns out that this part of A46 was built in the 1960s. Ironically, the A1 or at least parts of it were among the original Weimer/Third Reich era highways, though no trace of that time remains. Indeed, all of Germany’s highways have been expanded, rebuilt and expanded so often by now that almost no traces of the original 1920s/1930s highways remains. When I was a kid, some of the old highways and bridges (as well as Börde service station near Magdeburg) still existed in near original condition. They’re all gone now – the last surviving bit of original 1930s highway near the Polish border was decommissioned and rebuilt in 2019.

The A46 cuts through Wuppertal, though again you don’t see much of the city, at least not much that’s actually interesting. At this point, the name “Neuss” actually starts showing up on signage. The highway passes Solingen, a city famed for the manufacture of knives and blades, and reaches Düsseldorf, state capital of North-Rhine-Westfalia and one of the three big D-cities in the Ruhrgebiet (the others are Dortmund, which I passed earlier in the day, and Duisburg).

The signs on the highway announced that Neuss would be the next city after Düsseldorf. However, then my GPS instructed me to take the exit Düsseldorf-Bilk. I was a little confused – after all, I was almost in Neuss, so why leave the highway one exit early? But I decided to trust the GPS, especially since I didn’t know the area at all. Besides, cities do tend to blend into each other in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.

After leaving the highway, I finally crossed the river Rhine and got a nice view of Düsseldorf’s skyline with the Rhine Tower telecommunications tower and observation deck and the distinctive buildings of the Media Harbour (Düsseldorf’s old inland harbour was turned into a hipster neighbourhood plus hub for the media industry in the 1990s). Turns out that Neuss is on the other side of the Rhine opposite Düsseldorf, so my GPS was right.

Neuss is actually quite an interesting city – one of the oldest in Germany, founded by the Romans in 26 BC, i.e. Neuss is celebrating its 2040th anniversary this year. Not that I saw anything of that aside from a glimpse of what appeared to be a medieval watchtower or city gate. Because the con venue, Stadthalle Neuss, was on the outskirts of the city. Though I also passed a large and not very enticing 1970s shopping mall called Rheinpark Center and the German headquarters of 3M along the way.

Then, a little over three hours after I departed, I swung onto the parking lot of Stadthalle Neuss. I was happy to have made it, not remotely tired anymore and eager to go to the con. But that’s a topic for the next post.

ETA: Part 2 with my adventures at the con itself is now up and can be seen here and part 3 about the trip back home is here.