March 17 - Another Bike Ride in the Sachsenwald

Sunshine! Not only sunshine, but HOURS of it! So we just had to get out and try to enjoy the day, ultimately deciding on a bike ride thru the Sachsenswald. I had found a way thru it that looked good plus a return on a major street (including bus stops) that we hoped would have a bicycle path with it. To get there we rode over to the Wohltorf station that had the elevator, caught the 9:12 out to Aumuehle, and rolled downhill to a gas station to pump up the tires. But once again I was thwarted by the lack of standardization in Germany—the air tanks at the gas station were designed apparently for the larger Schroeder valves common on cars and trucks, but not the smaller Presta valves on our bikes! Nuts! Hoping I had sufficient air pressure to handle the cobblestones, I headed over a small dam and uphill onto the car/bicycle trail into the woods.

The bike paths in Germany tended to be fairly wide, so I had hoped we would be able to ride together in a nice, relaxed fashion where we could talk a bit. But the difference in our bikes and riding styles made that happen only rarely. On the up hill stretches, Monika could gear down and keep going, but if I couldn’t make it by standing on the pedals I just had to get off and push, and that happened more and more frequently as I got more and more tired. For the sandy and muddy stretches, however, my style was to speed up and try to blast thru it whereas Monika’s style was to slow down and try to pick her way thru it. As a result, I typically went ahead on those stretches, unless they were up hill, of course. So we ended up passing each other a lot but rode together rather infrequently as we worked our way across the Sachsenwald. On a subsequent trip to the northern part of the U.S. (Wanderung 6) we had matched trail bikes and found that we did in fact have well matched cycling paces (quite slow for both) when we were riding equivalent bicycles.

I tell you, though, that as the day progressed I started to get much more savvy about mud and its effect on a bicycle. Basically you have to judge how deep it is to the centimeter before you actually hit it, admittedly a difficult task from the seat of a bicycle. If the mud was a centimeter deep or less, I found I could pretty much ignore it altho it would certainly slow me down noticeably. If it was one to two centimeters deep, I found I could speed up and usually blast thru it unless it was a really long stretch. But mud that deep really bogged me down, and it was so slippery and unstable that standing up on the pedals to get more power was a tricky business indeed. Still, I had a lot of practice on this ride and by the end could handle it. As for mud three centimeters deep or more, you might as well forget it and get off the bike and start pushing, at least if you have a single-speed street bike like I did. I decided ask my mountain-biking nephew David about mud when I got back to the U.S. in the hope that he could give me some tips for these situations.

Well, one way and another we finally arrived at a parking lot on the other side of the Sachsenwald. However, when we looked at the street that led back we found it had no bike path, no shoulders at all, narrow lanes, and fast traffic. In fact, it reminded me of the old Braddock Road at home, a road that no sane bicyclist would ever take. We decided that also in this case it would be extremely risky, if not downright dangerous, to try taking that street back, so we turned around and retraced our route back to Aumuehle. There Monika saw a sign for the Schmetterling Garten (Butterfy Garden) at Fredrichsruhe, so we took a path a couple of kilometers thru the forest to find it. Unfortunately, at the gate we found a sign that said it didn’t open until March 20th, so we had to put that off a bit. On the way back to the station we stopped off at the Train Museum near Aumuehle, but we found it was only open for certain on the Monday after Easter, so we had to put that off also. I started to feel like we were on strike three for the day, and my legs were starting to feel like jelly, so we turned back to Aumuehle to take the train back home.

We made the train at Aumuehle just in time—he was ready to leave but saw us pushing our bikes off the elevator and waited for us, I think, which is one of the few times I’ve seen that happen in Germany. But just as I grabbed the frame to hoist my bike onto the train, the bicycle pump popped off its mounting, spun around in the air, and went headfirst into the gap between the platform and the train. It still amazes me that the pump would pop off at that exact moment and rotate to fall exactly into the gap—if it had come off at any other time I could have saved it, and if it hadn’t rotated it wouldn’t have fit into the gap. It was a good example of Murphy’s law, I guess. I was faced with the choice of trying to reach underneath a train getting ready to lurch into motion and grab the pump (too smart for that), jumping back onto the platform and waiting for the next train (too tired for that), or just mentally declaring the pump a goner and continuing on our way home (my choice). I heard some strange crunching sounds from underneath us as our train accelerated, and I rather fancied those sounds signaled the demise of the pump. Probably it was just as well that it was a plastic one or it might have derailed the train! Fortunately we had no more disasters on our way home because I was getting too tired to cope well. We just rode past some pretty houses on our way back home from the station

Altho we were both moving pretty slowly after we put the bicycles away, Monika fixed lunch while I painted some shelves in the kitchen and an old wooden lawn chair that was peeling. During lunch I once again noticed that the canned vegetables in Germany, in this case peas, were firmer and tastier than I would expect in the U.S. I did not see frozen vegetables in Germany at all, and I imagine the smaller refrigerators would militate against frozen vegetables since they tend to take a lot of space. But we were pleasantly surprised by the canned and fresh vegetables such as cauliflower, carrots, and Brussels sprouts. This phenomenon of better taste had happened so consistently by this time that I started to think of possible explanations. The first explanation was that we had both changed in Germany and our taste buds and become more sensitive to flavors, but I couldn’t think of any plausible reason that would have happened so it had to be something about the food. For the canned food, I think they just don’t cook them in Germany as long or as hot as they do in the U.S., which would explain the firmness and increased flavor. For the fresh vegetables, I came up with the possibilities that either the vegetables were simply fresher or something about the ground they were grown in was giving them more flavor. If anyone else knows the answer to this, please let me know.

We collapsed after lunch into our two comfortable chairs in the living room (actually, the only chairs in the living room). These chairs were Detlet’s old living room chairs, and are roughly a Breuer chair S-frame design but with the frame made out of beautiful laminated wood rather than metal and nice canvas-covered cushions suspended from the frame. The wood frame has enough spring in it that you can kind of rock a bit while laying back in the chair—VERY comfortable. So comfortable, in fact, that we found ourselves falling asleep and we finally just gave up and went upstairs for a nap. That made it two days in a row for naps, and I was surprised because this reversed the curious fact that over the last two weeks in Germany we had taken almost no naps at all. I had been enjoying that change because it was really nice to have the whole day to do things, so I hoped that this was just due to a totally exhausting morning rather than some biorhythm thing catching up with me.

The nap refreshed us enough to take a walk down to the local bakery to buy some rolls for Kaffeetrinken. We saw three children running as a pack into the bakery in front of us chattering all the while, and a rather harried looking mother bought exactly one roll for each of them, which made them ecstatic. In general, we saw more children playing around outside in Germany than we have seen in the U.S. in the last couple of years. There seemed to be a lot of playgrounds and tot lots scattered here and there for the kids and these are well used. We also saw a surprising number of very young children (roughly 4-6 years) playing outside either alone or in small groups. In the U.S. the parents of young children seem much too paranoid to let their children play by themselves in public places, which I think is ensuring safety but at the cost of depriving them of some forms of peer socialization that are really important. If I’m right, the current generation of U.S. children (especially those who “home schooled”) will be less well socialized than their German counterparts are and I’m not sure what the ultimate effects of that difference will be in the long run.

But sometimes even I got worried about these German kids. “Once a parent, always a parent” seems to be true for me, at least, and when I saw small kids traveling alone on the train system I started to get worried. The youngest kids I saw seemed to be about 8, and Monika remembers traveling on her own around the age of 6, but that was back a few decades. I particularly started to itch with fatherly impulses when I saw a boy and girl, obviously brother and sister, chasing each other around a train platform. First, if they fell off the platform you have the danger from the high voltage hot rail, and secondly there was a train approaching any second. It was all I could do to not break out in a fatherly lecture—I think all that stopped me was that I couldn’t readily translate any of the old standards that would fit the situation. Somehow, “Don’t run with those scissors, do you want to put your eye out?” or “Look both ways before crossing the street!” didn’t seem to fit the bill. I still remember how Judson (?) after I gave the watch-for-traffic lecture ostentatiously looked over his left shoulder and then his right shoulder, and then charged straight out into the path of oncoming traffic! (I had to give supplementary lectures in that case.) So I was stymied in terms of taking action (altho the thought of grabbing one by the knapsack as they went shooting for the edge of the platform did occur to me), but I surely was nervous watching those two kids careening around in front of an oncoming train.

I finished up the day chopping wood in the sun, which was at least one way to enjoy the weather. Besides, it let us keep up our habit of nightly fires that we enjoyed so much. In fact, we used the chopped wood to have our usual comfortable evening in front of the fire and TV. The organization of German TV has some distinct advantages compared to the U.S. In particular, I was so happy to have the news condensed into 15 minutes of misery, so to speak, rather than dragging it out for 2 hours as they do in the U.S.—that is just such as waste of time. Also, the quality of the picture given by the PAL system with more display lines really does seem to be better than the U.S. NTSC system, but that’s just my impression. On the state supported 1st and 2nd Program, commercials appear for only the “prime time” hours from 6 to 8, but on all the other stations there are commercial breaks about the same as in the U.S. The content of the commercials was different in that there were far fewer ads for prescription medicine compared to the U.S., but correspondingly more ads for non-prescription medicines and especially herbal types of remedies.