March 16 - A rainy day in Reinbek

We had another cloudy, rainy day, so we put off another bike ride in the Sachsenwald in the hope of getting a nice day for it. Instead, we went searching for an Internet café to check out email as Heinke and Gustl were off to Kappeln the following weekend and we wouldn’t be seeing them for possibly a week or so. We ended up finding internet access at a computer teaching center at the Mini Mall where we were buying skim milk—they offered us time on their computers for about 1.5 Euro for each 15 minutes. We thought that was a fair price and it took us almost exactly 30 minutes to throw out junk emails, answer the emails from our family, and send out the journal entries from our first week in Germany. The curious thing was once again the trusting nature of the transaction. The manager unlocked the door to let us in but then left us sitting alone in the classroom with all these expensive machines. He also depended on us to come and find him back at the office and pay for our time, which we did, but I rather expect the U.S. version of this transaction would have either been a credit card or some kind of “pay in advance”.

I must admit I felt almost like a character on Startrek Voyager when a wormhole suddenly appears and they can shoot the ship’s log and reports back to mother Earth. In this case, the Internet outlet was our wormhole and our “data burst” was the text format of the prolog and first several days of the trip stored as text to keep it under 100 kilobytes. Just like Startrek, we had to close our internet connection before we were really certain anyone had received the report and could read it, so we had to be content with waiting for the next contact to check on the reception of the message. Using the Internet this way was a curious form of communication with time lags ranging from days to weeks, but it was certainly better than no communication at all!

Gathering our 4 liters of skim milk and some bicycle maps I found on sale at the Mini-mall, we returned home. Milk is sold in super-hot Pasteurized 1 liter boxes in Germany that can keep without refrigeration for a couple of months, so we only had to keep the liter we had open at the time in the refrigerator. That saved space and was a noticeable advantage over the typical 1-gallon containers in the U.S. when you take into account the small refrigerators in Germany. We fell into the pattern of buying as much as possible at Aldi because it was both cheap and extremely convenient, but we shopped for the other items at the bigger, more expensive stores like the Mini-Mall or Famila.

The bike maps were produced by the German version of AAA (called ADAC here) and they turned out to be very interesting when we got a chance to look at them at home. First, they were in a 1:75000 scale that showed most of the main and side streets. But even more importantly the maps had special ways of showing which streets or paths were good, bad, or just OK for riding a bicycle. In particular, streets were marked for “quiet bicycling streets”, “heavily traveled stretches”, “streets with a separate bike path”, “unavoidable stretches on heavily traveled streets”, “streets unsuitable for bikes” and “stretches where bicycles are prohibited”. In addition, however, paths were shown with distinct symbology that indicated “easily traveled path”, “bad surface but passable paths”, “don’t drive a bicycle on this path!”. Finally, the elevation was marked with contour lines, high points, and even symbols on streets for uphill grades of 3-7% or grades of over 7%. Those mild grades are pretty unimportant in driving a car, but they can be critical pieces of information for planning a bike trip. All in all, I thought these maps did an excellent job of giving information relevant to bicycling. Since two of them covered the Hamburg area and the Elbe downstream, I hoped they would help us plan successful bicycle trips in the local area.

We checked on the maps for the locations of the Volksmarches on the next weekend and found that we could fairly easily reach the one in Neumuenster but we just couldn’t figure out a good way to get to the one in Leck. Leck lies northeast of Husum where we had walked 2 weekends back, but it is kind of in a “black hole” of the public transportation network. The closest train station was at least 20 kilometers off, and then we would have had to find a bus to take us to Leck, and we would still have had to walk several kilometers to the starting point. That wouldn’t be too bad at the beginning of the day, but after 4 or more hours of hiking, walking those extra kilometers back and trying to catch a bus to get back to the train seemed daunting. We finally decided to omit the Leck walk but try to get to the one in Neumuenster on Sunday. Clearly, with a car we could have made the walk in Leck, so this was the downside of relying on public transportation.