Wolfsburg; Friday, 05 September, 2025

In the end I didn’t have as good a nights sleep as I would have liked as the massive, but almost volume-less pillows weren’t conducive to getting proper sleep and I woke up multiple times through the night. It did mean that I didn’t have to worry about missing my alarm, and breakfast – though by the time I headed down just after 08:30 it was clear that they were finishing for the day (even though breakfast was supposed to be served until 10) as most of the tables had been set for lunch and the buffet was looking a little thin. Breakfast completed I headed back up to my room to have some coffee and repack my bag before heading back into the centre of town to catch the train out to Wolfsburg.

I deliberately got to the station relatively early as I thought the train might be quite busy, in fact I arrived on the platform just as in the inbound train from Wolfsburg arrived, over 30 minutes before its departure, but this turned out to be the right approach as the train filled up quite quickly and with 10 minutes left to departure there were already a couple of people standing. By the time the train left Hannover it was pretty packed.

The train arrived in Wolfsburg on time just after 12:30 and during the journey I’d had an email from the hotel to say that my room was ready so I was able to walk the 50m or so from the Hauptbahnhof to the hotel, grab my key card and head straight up to my room.

A little later I headed back down and out away from the city centre to the main visitor attraction in the city – Autostadt. This is a park and visitors centre attached to the global headquarters of a small motor manufacturing group called Volkeswagen. Whilst there is an old castle and a handful of older buildings, Wolfsburg itself was built as a city to house the workers of the VW factory constructed to build the Beetle. Just gently skip over that all those dates are in the latter part of the 1930s!

Whilst I’m not really into cars, there was quite a lot to see in the park including exhibitions on design icons (not just the VW Beetle and Camper Van but also furniture, technology and construction) and a collection of historic vehicles from the earliest horseless carriages through to the Bugatti Veyron and other modern sports cars. The collection also includes the oldest surviving and the last ever produced original Beetles as well as the millionth Mini and examples of the Iconic VW camper van.

I spent quite a long time looking round both the museum and the parkland before heading for the exit as they started to close the park down. I then grabbed a quick bite to eat from the Grill Pavillion in the neighbouring design outlet mall before wandering into the centre of the city to have a quick look around.

The centre of Wolfsburg isn’t particularly attractive, dating as it does to the mid-1930s and then post war expansions, and there isn’t anything historic to see around the main shopping area, so in the end I headed back to my hotel for the evening.