April 1 - Lauenburg

Since it was forecast to be sunny and fairly warm (50s) again, we decided to show Lois the town of Lauenburg and the Hebewerk that Heinke and Gustl had shown us earlier. The weather did, in fact, cooperate and I drove along the north side of the Elbe and parked exactly where Gustl had parked a couple of weeks back. We set the little time indicator gizmo to indicate 10:50 and put it in the windshield; we then had 2 hours to see the town, which turned out to be about right. Following the route pioneered by Heinke and Gustl, we walked first to the overlook and then down into the old town section. However, this time we found a gilded bronze statue on the bluff that neither of us had seen the last time we were there, and we just had to wonder if we had somehow missed it or if the town had just brought it back out of winter storage. The statue itself of a gilded but otherwise unclothed woman kneeling down and it really gleamed in the sunlight. I’m not sure about the artist’s intended message, but I thought that the statue was a perfect reflection of the tendency of the northern Germans to rip off layers of clothing and run outside to enjoy the sun whenever it shines.

The big old watchtower was still there and the sun was reflecting off the Elbe where it joined the canal to Luebeck. We read that this canal had been first constructed in the 1390s, which must make it the oldest canal I have seen by far. One of the important purposes of the old canal was transporting salt from the local mines north to Luebeck for transshipment around the Baltic Sea, and that trade kept the town of Lauenburg economically viable from the late middle ages into modern times. The oldest homes dating from the early 1600s had carved exterior wall beams that had sagged under the weight of several centuries. I wondered how on earth they kept the floors level inside with some of the sagging I saw from the outside.

The old streets were as crooked in their way as some of those beams, and the cobblestone paving made our footing precarious, but we wandered along to the bronze statue of the “Rufer” at the edge of the Elbe. The statue is of a sailor calling out over the water and to me he represented all the inland shipping sailors who worked in Lauenburg over the centuries. We curled around at the far end of the old district and walked back past some of the old houses and shops of the town. The latter included a potter who was busily throwing pots on her wheel right beside the shop’s front window. As always, I found it fascinating to watch a skilled worker ply her trade and I was tempted to go inside, but the thought of carrying large amounts of pottery back to the U.S. in our very limited luggage space dissuaded me.

So we wound our way back past the church (unfortunately closed) uphill to the car and tried to find a place to eat. Altho we crisscrossed the new central business district on the top of the bluff, we failed to find a suitable place. One place had a good looking menu with fair prices, but the cigarette smoke hit Monika in the face so badly when we opened the door that we just turned around and walked out. We did, after all, want to be able to taste our lunch! Another place just had pastries, still another place just offered ice cream dishes, and yet another place seemed to only have breakfast dishes and lots of alcoholic beverages.

Altho we struck out there, as we were driving out of town I spotted an Imbiss Stube that had a couple of tables with chairs, so we stopped to check it out. The smoke level was tolerable, it looked clean, and the proprietress was very pleasant, so we stayed to have a great lunch. Lois and I had thick slabs of tasty roast pork with carrot balls and boiled potatoes, a really hearty lunch, while Monika stuck with a bockwurst and fried potatoes. The portions were so large that I was the only one who could finish (naturally) and even I couldn’t finish off Monika or Lois’s leftovers the way I would usually do, so I had to let some food go to waste (I have not seen take-home containers in Germany).

Feeling completely satisfied, we drove south to the Hebewerk on the canal heading south from Hamburg to the middle of Germany. During this visit the Information Center was open so that we could learn more about it. In contrast to the old Lauenburg—Luebeck canal, this canal from Hamburg to the south dated from the post WWII era Iron Curtain era when the canals of the Eastern Zone were cut off by the guarded border. The West German government was forced to build an alternate route south for the inland shipping and did so at great cost. In fact, the current German government is now improving the canal infrastructure in the old Eastern Zone and making better connections with the canal network of the western section to help in the continued growth of a reunited Germany. We found a working scale model of the entire setup of the Hebewerk and a lot of information about exactly how it worked. That was nice because these ship elevators are so huge that it’s really impossible to get a decent picture of the thing, unless, of course, one has a blimp or helicopter to get an aerial perspective. One curious fact was that the engines which move the lifts are only 400 horsepower. The explanation was that the counterweights are so exactly matched to the weight of the boat elevators that only a small amount of force is required to move them. Fascinating.

A second room in the center described other boat lifts on the German canal system and showed the entire system on a wall map. We were all, I think, impressed with the extent of canal system in Germany. It connects with the French canal system such that you can easily get from Germany to Paris or southern France. Wouldn’t it be fun to take some kind of houseboat thru Germany and France for a couple of months? One thing I did not see was any hint of what it cost to use the canals and locks, so I’m not sure if it is in fact free or there are costs for each section.

From there we walked over to see the Real Thing, which was as big and impressive as on our last visit. We saw the lifts go up and down during this visit altho no boats were in them at the time, and I noticed that the only part of the cycle where they leak any water is when they are opening the doors at either end of the lock. A regular shower of water came out right when the door was opened but then it tapered off and stopped, so I imagine that the sealing system is kind of pushed into place by water pressure. Lois mentioned how much my brother Terry would like to see such an engineering marvel and I expect he would. We went up the 180+ stairs to the top but no boats were in sight, so we finally gave up and drove back to Reinbek along the south side of the Elbe. That way Lois could see the chain of small towns that lies along the edge of the river and gets flooded every few decades when the Elbe overflows.

Since I was driving instead of Gustl, I had to keep my eyes on the road, but I could at least spare a glance at the prices of gasoline as we passed the gas stations. I had been able to blissfully ignore gasoline prices while we used mass transit for the past month, and unfortunately I found that they had increased in the interim. Our Opel needed premium gasoline (drat it!), and I was seeing 1.11 to 1.15 Euro per liter for premium. The other thing I noticed was that the price difference between premium and regular was much less in Germany (about 2 cents per liter or 8 cents per gallon) than it typically is in the U.S. (at least 15-20 cents a gallon in areas where I drive). In the U.S., of course, I try to only purchase cars that run on regular!

The other difference between the two countries is the relative cost of diesel fuel versus regular gasoline. In Germany diesel is always cheaper by about 10 cents a liter or 40 cents a gallon, but in the U.S. I have found it to typically be slightly more or less expensive than regular gasoline, by say 5-10 cents a gallon, and generally not readily available. I think diesel fuel for cars is still a niche market in the U.S. whereas if I understand correctly in Europe the use of diesel fuel to increase gas mileage has been officially encouraged by lower government taxes. In any case, there were certainly more diesel powered cars on the road in Germany than you would see in the U.S.

Our little Opel used gasoline, but with only a 1.2-liter displacement engine it turned out to be quite fuel-efficient. I was pleasantly surprised that such a small engine could easily sustain 120 kilometer per hour speeds, at least on a flat grade. This was mainly possible, I assume, because the car was aerodynamically clean and had a small frontal area combined with a low drag coefficient. The only downside of the tiny engine was that it had almost no rotating mass and I repeatedly killed the engine if I popped the clutch in first gear. Also, impatient Germans tended to pass if I didn’t do exactly 100 kph on the rural segments of the narrow two-lane roads. Still, we made it home safely and had a nice relaxing evening reading, writing, and puzzling. If I renamed those activities as Perusing, Portraying, and Puzzling I could say that instead of learning the three R’s we were doing the three P’s, but I would never do that.