Ausflug 39

Sunday dawned bright and sunny. It was a perfect day to go to the beach, but we expected with the 4-day weekend due to German Unification Day that thousands of local folks would do just that, making the local bicycle lanes more akin to an obstacle course than a realistic way to travel.

So instead we turned our ebikes Westward and decided to revisit Eutin, a pretty old town with a large central square. Our track was basically inland and uphill a bit to Suesel, a crossroads village just past the Autobahn to the West, and thence to Eutin using one of several paths. Going out, we used the bicycle path/sidewalk along the main highway, but it was RIGHT BESIDE the road, plus the pavement was cracked, broken, and buckled, resulting in a rather wild ride. .

That was a bit of a problem for me because my speed controller had failed, leaving me with the "full on" or "full off" options for my electric motor. Since the section from Suesel to Eutin was still gradually uphill, the "full off" position was too slow, and since the pavement was really uneven the "full on" position was dangerously fast. But finally we got to the McDonald's on the outskirts of Eutin and then turned to go downhill into the city, which lies on the shore of a small lake.

We past an ornate blue letter box at the entrance to the market square and chained our bikes to a bike rack, which was way more convenient that circling around to find a parking spot with a car. Then we began to walk a big circular route around the old, picturesque section of the town. Our fist stop was, however, a "1 Euro" store (English: "Dollar Store") just down the street from the bike rack, which we had visited the year before. It was still in business, and I have a weakness for such cheap thrills, so we loaded up on 1 Euro LED flashlights, candy, carabiners, and even a plastic Vernier caliper to use back home!

Bundling all our miscellaneous junk into the saddlebags, we continued to circle the streets outside the market square. We saw a sign for an old windmill but were just too tired and hungry to chase that down. Instead, we followed an old guy trundling a radio-controlled sailboat on a wagon down to the lake past some roses that were still blooming and a bronze statue of a local yokel. The tourist boat that operates in the summer season was not running, of course, but we had a Gyro-to-go special from the fancy lakeside restaurant next door (3 Euro!), and sat on a lakeside bench for a relaxed lunch with a wonderful view.

That gave us the energy to walk back through the market square and shop at the Troedel Markt (a German low-scale equivalent of an antique store), but it was closed because it was a holiday weekend! Instead we circled the beautiful fountain in the middle of the square and then climbed on our bikes for the ride back to Haffkrug.

We tried taking an alternate route to avoid that dangerous roadside path on the way back, and thus detoured through Roedel and then onto a kind of dirt farm road cut through the fields and forests. The big "pro" of such roads is that there is absolutely NO traffic to worry about--although the road is fine for farm tractors, no car driver in their right mind would risk getting their automobile stuck or damaged on a road like that.

The big "con" of such roads is the complete unpredictability of what kind of road surface lies around each curve. Although most often the road was a decent hard-packed dirt, every now and then we, or more accurately our ebikes, had to endure sections of rocky outcroppings, mud, and deep sand. Our ebikes are "city" bikes rather than mountain bikes, so they are not really designed for that type of surface and thus those sections required rather careful navigation, to say the least. Really, though, with the electric motors it all becomes a barrel of fun even if it is brutal on the bikes. Neither of us crashed, but I was bumped strongly enough to snap my teeth together at one point, but fortunately no crowns broke. When we got to an old farmhouse, we knew we were back in civilization.

Returning through Suesel, we crossed the Autobahn and then the railroad, where we heard a train coming and dismounted in time for me to snap a pic of the fast ICE train from Hamburg to Copenhagen as it rushed past. By the time we returned to Haffkrug we were well and truly tired, but it had been a wonderful ride in the country.