March 8 - Bergedorf

The day dawned bright and sunny (altho quite cold, in the low 20s), so we decided to do some kind of outdoor activity. You don’t waste sunny days in Hamburg—there are too few of them! Seriously, we seemed to getting only 1 out of 3 or 4 days with a decent amount of sunshine, which was in stark contrast to the ratio back home of about 2 sunny days for each cloudy one. During our time in Hambug, in fact, I started to develop a twitch that whenever I saw the sun break out I should immediately get out the camera and start taking pictures! Just in our back yard we had snowbells and crocuses blooming, and so many of the houses and churches in our area were breathtakingly beautiful in the sunlight.

But the first order of business was to buy groceries. They had very effective “blue laws” in Germany—almost no stores were open on Sunday, only a few bars and restaurants. So we had to carefully buy enough food on Saturday to last us thru the weekend and restock necessary food items on Monday when the stores re-opened. So we hopped over to Aldi for the morning grocery run, and I found a really nice carpenter’s level that I couldn’t resist buying. That’s what made shopping at Aldi so much fun for me; I never knew what kind of things they might have on sale that week.

First of all, this carpenter’s level was large, 1 meter long, and it was really cheap, only 3 Euro. You can see right there that it was a lot of level for the money. Secondly, it had a unique combination of additional features: a measuring tape hidden in one end, a pivoting T-arm for measuring angles in the middle, and attachments to draw circles up to one meter in diameter. I mean, who knows when you might need to draw some really big circles? Finally, it was a cheerful bright yellow, and that was the clincher. It’s always nice to have cheerful tools around—you know what I mean, the ones that say “Good morning, Bob, let’s make something!” when you come into your workshop. The only thing that was a problem that when we went home exactly how was I going to pack a 1-meter long, yellow carpenter’s level in my baggage? But I figured I would cross that bridge when I came to it. (Monika’s comment: “We can always give some clothes to the local Goodwill, and come back with tools instead of clothes!”)

After the shopping run we took the S-Bahn to Bergedorf, which was one station to the west in the direction of Hamburg. Bergedorf is a larger city than Reinbek and Monika figured it might have a wider selection of stores. We had also read about a cruise ship line operating out of Bergedorf that had offered free tours of the ship last Saturday, and we figured we could go by and at least look at the ship. I had a lot of trouble believing that a ship line would operate out of Bergedorf, however, because we were far from the Elbe and the only river around here, the Bille, seemed too small to be navigable by anything larger than a rowboat!

The shopping in Bergedorf was, in fact, more extensive than the scattering of shops in Reinbek, but of course less than what was available in downtown Hamburg. We found a nice heated mini-mall about a block down from the train station. Curiously, it included a Woolworth’s store that reminded me very much of the ones we used to have in the U.S. I was very surprised because as far as I knew the chain had gone bankrupt in the 1980s, but maybe the German branch was independent. Monika bought some washcloths there, and I found a very nice set of 4 power tools for 49 Euro. I didn’t buy the set because I already had my hammer drill and didn’t really need the others, but it just goes to show that cheap tools can be bought in a surprising variety of stores in Germany.

We never did see any signs of that tourist ship. I did see one old wooden ship sunk at its moorings in the tiny lake in the middle of the city, but like Monika said, if that was the cruise ship we certainly didn’t want to take a trip in it! Across the street was an old church—Germany is full of them—and a nice little castle complete with a moat (Germany is almost full of those, too, I think.). The petite castle was really very pretty and was currently housing a city historical museum, but it was unfortunately closed. For anyone visiting Germany, you should always consider that almost all of the museums are closed on Mondays, so schedule your days accordingly!

We were disappointed about the museum being closed, but consoled ourselves with walking back to Reinbek along the parkland that borders the Bille River. The path a wide, nicely graded forest path, but muddy in some spots and still covered with ice and snow in the sections in deep shade. My GPS said we covered about 6 kilometers, but it took us a good hour and a half and by the time we arrived home we felt like we had accomplished our workout for the day. This path was a section of the trans-Europe hiking path, and our practice in looking for small signs while volksmarching helped us spot the small little white “X”s that marked the trail. Once we got used to it, however, we didn’t really have any problems with the trail markings as they were posted at each major choice point and for the small branches we just naturally continued on the main trail.

I had the notion of taking a bike along one of these extremely long trails because they pass thru or close to so many small villages that finding a place to stop overnight should not be a problem except maybe in the high season. In addition, you wouldn’t really have to carry much, if any, food because there seems to be little places to eat all over Germany (see Wanderung 2). Many railroad stations have Imbisses in or next to them and most small towns have at least one place to eat. I even saw a snack shop perched in the middle of the parking lot of the builder’s market we had seen the previous day in Reinbek! Of course, slogging thru mud, snow, and ice would make the ride difficult, so I imagine that the best time of year for that type of ride would be the non-winter season, which runs from May to September. But golly could you see a lot—Heinke told me that the “X” path we walked on actually starts on the northern coast of Germany and traverses the entire country down to the Bodensee on the southern border of Germany. What a trip that would make!

After doing my chores, which consisted mainly of chopping wood, we spent the evening in front of another cheerful, warming fire. I finally had the time to finish Asharo’s “Primary Inversion” book, a great sci-fi yarn and a real page-turner toward the end. It was so engrossing that I couldn’t put it down until I finished it, so we were up until about 11, which was quite a bit later than we usually turned in. At least it had a happy ending—if I get really engrossed in a book and it has a dreadful ending, it can really interfere with getting a good night’s sleep!