March 5 - Bicycling in the Sachsenwald.

My fondest wish was fulfilled! I slept thru until 8 a.m. and felt ready to take on the world. The sun was again shining brightly out of a clear blue sky, so we decided to take a bike ride in the Sachsenwald forest preserve after breakfast. Checking the map, we settled on a short bike ride to the Wohltorf train station followed by a short hop on the S-Bahn to Auhmuehle station that is right in the forest proper. Using Gustl’s map, we laid out a tentative loop along the paths in the preserve.

The ride to the Wohltorf train station was mostly downhill, so that part was easy, and we found the train station without any problem. I was delighted to find that the Wohltorf station had a handicap-access type of ramp in addition to the stairs so that we could ride our bikes underneath the tracks to the platform. A specially-designed elevator lifted us from the underpass to the level of the platform so we once again didn’t have to lug the bikes up any steps.

That elevator was, I’m sure, specially designed for bicycles. First, it had an odd rectangular shape, but we found out that it was exactly 1 bicycle long and 2 bicycles wide! Second, the elevator had doors in the front and back and was carefully arranged so that you rolled your bikes in at one level and then could roll them straight out on the next level. It was designed to work that way whether you were arriving or departing from the station, and besides making it easy on bicyclists it would have also been easier for people in wheelchairs, I think. I’ll have to check how our Metro station elevators work back in Washington, but I don’t think they are as well-designed as the one I found at Wohltorf. Of course, there were no ramps or elevators of any kind at the Reinbek station, so maybe the process of making trains handicapped-accessible was just starting in Germany. They seemed to be taking the tack of making it easier for bicyclists at the same time, which I think is a great idea.

The hop over Aumuehle was only a couple of miles so it was quite short and the station again had a bicycle elevator so we didn’t have to schlep the bikes down the steps—hurray! The bike trail began at a small dam about a block from the station, and I found a particularly picturesque old restaurant located beside the dam so we stopped to take a picture. But on the other side of the dam our trail became a cobblestone street, and that was a real challenge. My old bike didn’t have any suspension, so I found it a real bone-shaking ride and branched off as soon as I could, with the result that I started off down the wrong path, but we didn’t find that out until later.

The branch we took soon turned quite muddy and rutted. It was still well below freezing at night, so the ruts were frozen and that made the riding very difficult. I was relieved when we left the ruts behind, but then the surface changed to a deep sandy loam where I really bogged down with my 1-speed but Monika made out a bit better with the lowest speeds on her seven-speed. From that point things became increasingly difficult as we bounced and jounced over tree roots and stones. Sometimes it seemed we were pushing our bikes about as much as we were riding them!

Our choices for most of the ride seemed to be frozen mud, deep sand, tangled roots, or cobblestones. I was having fun trying to cope with all these diverse conditions, altho I did wish for more of a mountain bike than a city bike so I wouldn’t have to push it uphill so much. It was really strenuous and while bouncing over the cobblestones I had to clench my jaw so tight to avoid my teeth from crashing together that later that evening I had some really amazing pains shooting thru my jaw. Other than that and a lot of stretched muscles, however, I survived unscathed.

Monika was afraid of some spots and altho I pooh-poohed it, her fear turned out to be justified. She was finally surprised by a patch of thawed out, slippery mud and had her wheels slide out from underneath her. Since the thawed mud was soft, she didn’t get hurt too much when she fell except for having her knee gashed by some part of the bicycle as she went down. But she persevered and we finally reached a “main” road in the forest that was relatively smooth and free of obstacles, so the final couple of kilometers were fun. In retrospect it may be obvious that we should have stuck to streets with city bikes rather than taking them into the backwoods, but sometimes you have to learn by experience, I guess.

I bandaged Monika’s knee while we were waiting for the train back at the Aumuehle station. When we rode back from Wohltorf to our house I once again choose an incorrect turn and we ended up riding thru the forest down the block from our house. We felt tired, but by contrast, perhaps, the paths in this section of forest were relatively easy to bike on and we made it back home without further incident. Monika cleaned her knee but the pants, which were torn and soaked by mud on the outside and blood on the inside, were history.

We watched biathlon and cross-country skiing competitions that afternoon, taking a break to walk down to the Reinbek train station and check bus and train schedules for our planned trip for the following day to Husum. We also stopped off to get some skimmed milk as Aldi, like most other stores, only carries milk down to 1.5% fat, which is no good for the Kardiac Kid. We also stopped off in a bookstore where I bought a newer map of the Sachsenwald and ordered the Gunner Asch trilogy. That was another set of books I had enjoyed reading in the English translation and really wanted some day to read in German. The times I have managed to read the same work in English and German, I have been surprised by how often I have disagreed with the English translations and found latent meanings or nuances in the original work that did not survive the translation process. (Monika is, of course, often exhausted when I get done with this translation process!) So I would by all means recommend caution using translated works rather than the original source, which is a principle that is also a foundation of scholarly research.

The biathlon/skiing coverage was live from Kent, Maine and from some town in Finland. You might think this type of cross-country skiing coverage would inherently be about as interesting as watching grass grow and we have never seen live, complete coverage of these events on U.S. television. But the German coverage of these events was really exciting and the commentary quite interesting. I expect that the live, complete coverage of golf games in the U.S. would be about as puzzling (and boring) to the typical German as the coverage of cross-country skiing would be to the typical American. And I definitely watched a cricket match of England versus India once while in Britain that honest-to-god seemed to last for days. That had to be my all-time favorite for boring TV coverage, but the British lapped it up! So here’s to the quirks of each culture that can take almost any arbitrary activity and make it into an interesting sport! After a light evening meal we finished the evening watching “Berlin, Berlin”, the news, and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”—the latter definitely an American import—before turning in for the night.