Across the globe geeks are warbling like tweety birds about the awesomeness of The Avengers, and they can have it. It’s 6:20 pm on a cool Friday, and I’m drinking in the incredibly beautiful, green and very flat German countryside flying past my first-class train compartment window at a much higher rate than 60 frames per second. Bad Bentheim, Rheine, Melle, Bunde.

I’ll be in Berlin a little after 9 pm this evening, but I love this ride and this train. Okay, no wifi but I’ve been without it since I flew out of JFK last night at 8:30 pm.

No wifi from British Airways. No time to even blink as I ran across much of Heathrow in order to make a London-to-Amsterdam flight that left at 9:40 am after my trans-Atlantic flight arrived at 8:30 am — a little more than six and a half hours. No wifi on the Dutch train, and no wifi on the German one. I’m tapping this out with my right thumb on the iPhone. Best I can do. I’ve taken some decent photos…later.

The weather was too damp and chilly this morning. Is this May or what? Let’s warm it up a little.

I slept in the train compartment for a couple of hours this afternoon. Very peacefully, I should add. Trains are great because the tracks go right by the most beautiful spots and right into the heart of most European towns and cities and you can really trip out on the pastoral and the sense of history and culture whereas highways are built outside and apart from everything — sterile, cleared-out ghetto land.

We just passed by the first hilly area I’ve seen since leaving Amsterdam. I’m sorry but eye-filling, heart-warming European scenery makes me emotional. And we’re now in Minden, an industrial, mid-sized city. Two-plus hours until Berlin, which I’ve never really visited before.

My ex and I honeymooned in East Berlin in late ’87 as part of a general Iron Curtain honeymoon tour, but that was too restricted as we couldn’t go into West Berlin. But we visited Checkpoint Charlie, and I got yelled at by a Soviet officer for trying to take a photo — “Nyet!”