Ausflug 39

Our first foray to the North was up just past where Detlef had moored the Lumme to the city of Neustadt. We had to find our way past Sierksdorf, the coastal town with the fancy spa and nudist beach, and then past Hansa Park, a small amusement park with things like a Viking boat ride, roller coasters, and heaven knows what else. Although the bike path had just been repaved, the workers had set up barriers at each entrance to the new pavement! Given the real danger of riding on the busy street versus the minor difficulty of pushing our bicycles around those barriers, we and many of the local German bikers carefully worked our way around the barriers in order to use the path.

Once past Hansa Park, we stopped at an electronics outlet store similar to the Best Buy in America, and Monika found a 240-volt Apple plug for charging our iPads, which we had just barely been able to charge with the chargers we had brought with us from the USA (those chargers were rated for 220-volt input, so I am not sure why they did not work). Continuing across a bridge over an inlet into the old downtown area of Neustadt, we accidentally came across one of those authentic, hundreds-of-years-old houses scattered around Germany. They are built simply of stacked masonry and often have thatched roofs, but the walls are usually leaning this way and that and the windows are often rather out-of-kilter. Nevertheless, those old houses have seen so much history and look so cozy to live in that they entrance me.

Continuing to the church near the center of the old town section just uphill from the port/marina, we chained our bikes to a bike rack on the corner. One of the big pluses of riding bicycles is not having to worry about (or pay for!) a parking space in the cramped, historic old town sections of these small cities.

Since we were right next to the old church, we decided to tour that. Although it was a plain brick edifice from the outside, the brick church, built in the early 1200s by monks from Hamburg working their way North to Christianize the Vikings, was exquisitely beautiful on the inside. So much so, in fact, that Monika started to grumble about not having brought her camera with because she had thought that there was nothing worth while in Neustadt to take pictures of!

The church interior had clearly been cleaned and refurbished over the centuries, of course, but there were the gravestones of folks buried in the church walls to remind us just how old this church really was. The inside was a pristine white with Gothic style pillars soaring up to the ceiling, a very pretty sight. The altar had been decorated for the Fall Harvest Service called "Erntedankfest" (Literal translation: "Harvest-Thanks-Festival"). To me, of course, it looked like American Halloween decorations, but that holiday is not really celebrated in a secular fashion in Germany as it is in the United States.

Leaving the church, we wandered across a rather plain looking town square with a statue of two (3?) fishermen and down the main shopping avenue which led to a well-preserved section of the city wall and gate from the late Middle Ages, I would presume. There we found another 1 Euro store, but I controlled myself and we picked up mainly chocolate, which is darned cheap in those stores,. We had lunch in a bakery, and afterwards I found a set of nice bicycling maps for Northern Germany for 10 Euro, so I picked those up in anticipation of future tours with our ebikes.

Returning to the bikes, I stuffed the maps and chocolate into the panniers and we rode back to the South, stopping off at Lidl to shop for food. Lidl always seems to have a larger "non-food notions" section than Aldi, and I quite enjoy that section as it includes tools, automobile, and bicycle parts and supplies. So Monika bought food while I picked up an infrared heat-sensing gun for 20 Euro, a set of labeled valve stem caps for an automobile, and a multi-head screwdriver tool for the bicycles. Immensely please, I packed it all in the pannier bags and we worked our way back past the barriers on the bicycle path down to the beach at Sierksdorf and then South along the beach to Haffkrug to end our day.