IT'S just a little while until Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, Kwanzaa and Winter-een-mas, so you're already thinking about where you can go to avoid the responsibilities of the house, dog, cat, bird, fish and, it being the season of festive infidelity, perhaps even the car. First stop has to be Germany.
Believe it or not, Merkelstadt is metal lovers' heaven. We start our tour in Stuttgart. Here you get two nearly brand-new architectural masterpieces devoted to great god auto. The real looker is the Porsche Museum, with 80 porkers on show.
The whole structure sits on just three V-shaped columns. Right now there's an exhibition with five decades of Porsche prototypes and concept cars. You can combine the museum with a factory and restaurant tour where a particular highlight on the menu is US prime beef grilled fresh right in front of your eyes by Porsche's very best mechanics.
Over the road (figuratively speaking) is Mercedes. A more sophisticated creation by Dutch architects UN Studio, the Mercster museum has double the number of cars, with even more food outlets. You can see a "single continuous timeline of over 125 years of auto industry history".