We did it!! Museum Marathon Berlin 2014

This past weekend, I joined a group of 16 other museum enthusiasts to spend the day walking around Berlin, stopping at 26 different museums along the way. You may think that’s a little crazy, but despite the fact that it was actually heaps of fun, it was in aid of a good cause. The charitable project ‘1001 Ramps for Germany’ provides barrier free access to public buildings via portable wheelchair ramps, and the Museum Marathon Berlin was in fact a sponsored walk to raise money for this project. You can find out more about the project in this interview with one of the founders: 1001 Ramps for Germany – an interview with one of the founders

Portable wheelchair ramp. // Photo (c) Sozialhelden e.V.

After a forecast thunderstorm, we were blessed with beautiful sunshine all day long, and even a Neonazi demonstration and counter demonstration which blocked off part of our route forcing us to make some spur-of-the-moment changes did not dampen out spirits. We may all have been a little exhausted by the end of it, and our feet may still be hurting a little, but we did it!! 26 museums, almost 20km and over 8 hours later, we happily collapsed in the garden of the Jewish Museum Berlin over some drinks, and everyone agreed it had been a fantastic day. I got the chance to play tour guide, with the help of some of my museum colleagues along the way, so we didn’t just get a good walk out of it and raise some money, but everyone also learned lots about some of Berlin’s fabulous museums. And we even had visitors from England and Belgium joining us especially for the event.

Many many thanks to everyone who took part in walking the marathon, everyone who supported us by making a donation or cheering us along on the day via Twitter, and of course the museum that actively supported the event by offering us free entry, meeting us to give a short talk, providing refreshments and donating items to the goodie bags which we were happy to reward everyone with at the end of the day. The Museum Marathon would not have been the same without you all!

By the end of the day, we had raised over 670 Euro. Our fundraising target was 1001 Euro (mirroring the charity 1001 Ramps) and we’ll be keeping the donations page open for a while longer. So in case you’re hearing about the Museum Marathon for the first time, or if you were waiting to see if we completed the challenge, it’s not to late to make a donation, no matter how small. You can donate securely through the online fundraising portal betterplace.org, and all donations get forwarded directly to the charity: Museum Marathon Berlin 2014 – Donations Page

If you’re interested in how the day went, I’ve put together a Storify with everyone’s tweets and lots of photos – if you read through it, you’ll see Berlin from it’s sunny side, and learn lots of interesting things about many of its museums: