I’ve had Joomla sites on and off for a good few years now – it’s now almost 5 years since the whole History Direct thing went pearshaped – but the problem was that migrating from 2.5 to 3 was proving more than my poor little melon could cope with. After the whole debacle of losing the site when I upgraded from 1.5 to 2.5 I just couldn’t be bothered with all that again.

WordPress as a platform had a number of really attractive things going for it, not least that it appears to be extremely easy to update from one version to the next. It’s certainly developed massively since we originally started the History Times back in 2010. If we’d stuck with WP back then rather than go over to Joomla I wouldn’t have had this entire debacle! Anyway, it all went pretty well, with minimal swearing, and the only real time I had to spend was sorting some of the images out, in particular the featured image at the beginning of each post. I’m not 100% convinced that the galleries are working quite the way I want them to at the minute but they work and do at least have touch functionality for mobile.

Talking of featured images, talk of the mythical German Job road trip has reared its head again recently and planning is afoot – albeit at a very early stage just now. Brad and I now have a shared Google map of all the places we fancy heading to as part of the route to / from Wolfsburg and it’s starting to fill up nicely – mainly with breweries and bunkers. What’s pretty cool is that the route is almost working itself out rather than us making conscious decisions on mileage etc. The timescale we’re working to is relatively vague (some time in the next 5 years), but he has small  humans to consider and I don’t have a hugely paying job so I think that works quite nicely. It gives us plenty of time for bunker / WWII submarine research, and to save up for the fuel and merch bills which isn’t going to be cheap. There will be much merch!

Now I just have to persuade Brad of the merits of continuing another 140 miles to Berlin……

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This was in the days before either of us had swanky digital cameras, and neither of us owned VWs at the time – although I think my old 74 Beetle might have been languishing in bits in the folks’ garage.

I’d first visited Wolfsburg some 10 years previously on a German language exhange whilst I was at school – but that’s another story altogether (especially the bit about not being very well in the back of Thorsten Bork’s old man’s brand new VW!).

I had vague recollections about touring the factory back in 1992, but in the intervening period VW had constructed Autostadt, an enormous visitor centre right next door to the factory itself, so that was top of our list of things to see in Wolfsburg, along with the VW Museum itself. We weren’t exactly blessed with a great selection of places to stay, and ended up staying a couple of nights in a hotel that was on the edge of what can only be described as an industrial estate!

Autostadt was immense, and it took us most of the time we were there just to get around the ZeitHaus museum (all 5 floors of it!), before checking out the various different pavillions for each of the VW brands. Naturally we spent some time merching up in the gift shop – the postcards of which you can see in the Postcards From Wolfsburg post. The following day, we tootled across to the VW Museum to view their wares (and buy a couple more postcards!).

Now I just need to persuade Brad that we should visit again – this time in our old VWs. If only to get some better quality photos than those I took 11 years ago! Under the circumstances, that could be easier said than done…….

Related Internet Links

• Autostadt
• Volkswagen Automuseum

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Now that Clarence has joined the family I think we might need a return visit to get some bus related postcards!

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