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Usually, I start off any journey report with a complaint about airports and airlines. However, Gatwick is the least worst London airport and Air Berlin is sehr civilised; it sets off and lands on time, and gives us a pretzel, a soft drink and a chocolate heart, so I'll complain instead about the train to the airport, an unheated (because it's balmy at 6 in the morning, no?) clapped out Thameslink piece of rolling ~~crap~~ stock with the logo scrubbed out and a First Capital Connect sticker stuck over. The train equivalent of a second hand transit van with the previous business owner's logo painted out in a slightly different colour to the main paintwork. Anyway, it at least arrives on time and we set off into the skies. We don't fly over London, but can see it in the distance, a jumble of spiky towers looking somehow unimportant amongst the mass of fields and countryside.

Land into Hanover, capital of Lower Saxony, provider of both our Saxon forebears and our Hanoverian monarchy. I don't see anyone who looks like me or Elizabeth II, although people do keep trying to speak to me auf Deutsch, so maybe I seem familiar. We follow the red brick path around the city to the Holocaust memorial, the opera house, the half bombed Alteskirche which remains a ruin, similar to St Dunstan's in the East in the City, and the Neues Rathaus to look at models of the city in 1689 (small), 1939 (big), 1945 (destroyed) and today (sprawling) and to go up in the strangely slanting elevator to the viewing platform to take in the stadt panorama.

After a borek in a Turkish cafe, we meander down the river to the Altes Stadt with its churches, a 14th century house, public art, a mini-library outside the Marktkirche, a paved pedestrian area, and half timbered houses. It's fake though - these are not the same houses that stood here in 1939, they are a collection of the surviving Mediaeval buildings moved here post-war. The rebuilt part of Hanover seems to have been designed by the same brutalists that got ahold of England in the '60s - all three lane one way traffic-sodden streets, flyovers, underpasses, overpasses, TV towers, grimy concrete office blocks. Call me a mimsy sentimentalist but I much prefer the old town, even if it's not really real. We have delish koffee und kuchen at Hollandische Konditerei, then visit the Markthalle, which looks from the outside as if it would sell live crabs and currywurst, but is actually a Borough Market-esque international food court; unfortunately I'm not hungry enough to buy anything.

We take the envy-inducing train to Göttingen - double decker carriages! A whole car reserved for bikes! (not just two spaces you have to fight to use with wheel chairs and buggies). This isn't even the fancy ICE train, just a normal commuter transit. However, by the time we've arrived a Reggie Perrin style 11 minutes late (because we had to allow the fancy ICE train to go ahead of us) into Göttingen and the noisy German teenagers have irritated me, I've changed my mind somewhat. We are picked up by Nico and driven to his and Gus's house in Bovenden, a suburb a few miles away, to meet their baby Faith and cats: friendly Lila and shy Lily, and to eat lasagne and drink Pilsener.

Spargel im Spargel

In the morning, we walk up to Burger Plesse, an olde worlde Rapunzel castle on a hill (a steep hill). It's raining as we walk through the forest so the red squirrels, pine martens and wild deer that purportedly live here are hiding somewhere. Up at the castle though, whilst eating Spargel in butter sauce (not as good as green English asparagus, but fab to eat local specialties; as a vegetarian, it's quite rare) and ice-cream sundaes in the restaurant, the sun comes out, and on climbing the tower and admiring the views, I spend a happy quarter of an hour sunbathing on the metal roof.

Later, we go out on the bus to Göttingen, past the strawberry hut, Cafe Nostalgie with its spooky doll-lined windows, Netto, Burger King etc. Burger King appalls me somewhat - the Germans invented the Hamburger, the Americans took the notion and ran with it and now sell it back to the Germans. Like the gastronomic (I use the word loosely) version of the Beatles. The name Burger King makes no sense - how can one be a townsman and a Koenig at the same time?

Anyway, Göttingen is a small university town, twinned with Cheltenham, and bizarrely, Hackney, famous for churning out Nobel prize winners as well as Bismarck and the Bros. Grimm. It also has a goose girl statue that graduating students must kiss. We eat flammkuchen in the restaurant under the Rathaus, trying to get rat-arsed on Dunkel beer, then sit in the square eating more ice cream and apfelstrudel.

Set off on the autobhan to Kassel. We are deep in mittel Deutschland, probably the exact centre of the country, in the south of the North, and just over yar hills used to be the DDR. That forest once housed a Russian listening station. Outside Kassel is the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, an astonishing 18th century melée of picnic park, fake Scottish ruin, Apollo's Temple, a Baroque Schloss turned art gallery, and an imposing yet phallic Hercules monument-cum-water feature that would make the average garden fountain give up in shame. There's time for sandwiches and salad in the grounds before huffing up the hill in time for the water extravaganza, which has taken place for three hundred years and now, every Wednesday and Sunday at 2.30 p.m., you can see the water starting off as fountain before setting off on a spectacular descent down the steps until it erupts into the green pool below. People crowd around the sides of the steps, camcorders at the ready as if for some important religious ritual. Small boys jump out of the way at the last minute. They move quickly down the hill to the next stop, watching the water trickle over a man-made waterfall, hardy types jumping from stone to stone, until it GUSHES into an acqueduct which takes the water along until it SLOSHES down in a straight hydra-curtain until finally it falls into the final pond before it WHOOSHES up into a huge geysir type fountain. Not so much the awesome power of nature as the astonishing power of engineering. Georgian man's determination to bend nature to his will. Amazingly, it's all free.

Fahren fahren fahren auf dem Deutsche Bahn

For you, ze holiday is (almost) over. Nico drives us back to Göttingen and we get the ICE train to Hanover (no double decker train, no noisy teens, no tardiness). It's Bank Holiday and everything is dead. Have a coffee and walk up though the Georgian park to the Herren Häuser Garten, another stately home turned park, although this one does have a €5 entrance fee - hardly on the level of Kew. First into the Grossergarten, the classically designed formal gardens with more water features, topiary, a maze, some classical (and golden) nudes, a small but pleasant roserie, a fig house. It's sehr pleasant, but not that inspiring. Ordered neatness does not do it for me. I much prefer the Botannical gardens, but after a few cactii and orchid greenhouses, I am too exhausted to take in much of the lilyponds, lupin borders and dahlias, although I enjoy the pop art sparkles of the grotto. We eat lunch in the on-site café, which offers vegetarian options ranging from cheese salad to chips. I plump for kartoffelsalat and Dave has a Berliner Weisse - a light beer with green (or red) syrup. It tastes very much like lager and lime. Funny how what it is considered de trop in England is terribly sophisticated abroad (see also Cinzano and lemonade; sherry and soda does not have the same cachet. I suppose Pimms is the exception to this, but how much marketing have they had to do to push the idea that Pimms = posh?).

Some plant-saturated 5 hours later, we go back into the town and eat the sort of ice cream that would make Augustus Gloop sick, before light-railing it back to the airport where we've arrived far too early and sit disconsolately in Departures with nothing but a shut café for company. When it does finally open, I'm charged €2.70 for a bottle of water although it's actually €2.95 with a 25c plastic bottle tax, which is fair enough except there's no alternative. I'm sure the guy at the kasse, although amiable, wouldn't give me tap water and there are no water fountains here. If airports insist on taking our water away then we, the passengers, must insist on free water after security. Rise up my brethren and sistren! Wir haben Durst!