Bob:

The beautiful, sunny weather continued to hold, so we all decided to drive to a nature preserve just south of Hamburg and take a walk there. While Gustl was driving us out there, I played around with my GPS and its newly-installed detailed street map of the Hamburg area. It worked like a charm, but curiously enough by installing the detailed street map of Hamburg my GPS had converted all the display options into metric units like kilometers and kilometers per hour. Fiddling around with it, I by chance also found a "streets" display option which would tell us not only what street we were currently on, but also the name of each cross street as we passed it. That option struck me as particularly useful in Germany where major streets seem to change their name every 2 miles or so, which makes it much more difficult to figure out what street you are on and exactly where that street is on the map. I set that option as a default and by that time we had arrived at the parking area for the nature preserve.

The nature preserve turned out to be an old military training ground that had been de-activated and converted to a big park. The park had an extensive network of trails winding all over the place, possibly the result of the ruts worn by the tanks in the old military days, and we only explored a fraction of them in the two and a half hours we were there. The soil was rather sandy, as it is indeed in much of the Hamburg area, and the trees varied from birches and beeches to a some evergreen trees. Much of the open area was covered by the low-lying heather plants, which allowed us to see the entire lay of the land.

Monika:

Bob:

A sailplane airport was located on one side of the heath. The runway ended at a bluff and they launched sailplanes by a winch tow placed at the top of the bluff. We sat a while to see a plane launched, and finally were rewarded by a seeing the tow wind up a cable and sling a small sailplane into the air. The day wasn't warm enough to have strong updrafts and I don't think the wind was blowing up the bluff sufficiently strongly to have a good wind wave, but it was a holiday and at least a couple of pilots persisted in trying their luck. Heinke had carried a nice assortment of snacks in her backpack, and we enjoyed those on the journey back to the parking lot.

Monika:

Bob:

Since we were all still in pretty good shape after our walk, Gustl offered to drive us over to the Airbus complex in Finkenwerder. Although there wasn't much activity there when we arrived, probably due to the national holiday, the complex of buildings and runways was astonishingly large. We did see one of the "Guppies" or jumbo-sized transporter aircraft that are used to ship sections of aircraft fuselages to and from the plant. The huge, new Airbus 380 will in large part be built in Finkenwerder, and the runway had to be extended to accomodate the longer takeoff run for that big, heavy airplane. Unfortunately Gustl also told us that the nearby town had been depopulated to because of the increased noise and shaking due to the full power takeoffs making living there impossible.

From Finkenwerder we drove on a bit to the River Elbe at Cranz (across the river from Blankenese, one of the western suburbs of Hamburg), where we got out to stretch our legs a bit. The tide was out, so mud flats lined the shoreline but a deep channel still extended from the bridge out to the main shipping channel in the middle of the Elbe. Some folks were taking advantage of the national holiday and the nice weather to take a little trip in their boats. I was amused by one little wooden powerboat that had a German flag on the back that, as Heinke said, "Was almost as big as the boat!" Reunification day is, I think, as important to Germans as the 4th of July is to citizens of the U.S., and for much the same reason.

Monika:

Bob:

From Kranz we drove back to Barmbek for Mittagessen, during which we discussed our general plans for the driving tour. Since our first stop was the Harz mountain region in central Germany, Gustl provided us with a book about the attractions in the region plus a map of the western side of it. The old border between West and East Germany had run down right through the middle of the Harz region, so Gustl's most detailed map only covered the western section. I spent the rest of the afternoon digesting the book and the map and setting up with Monika a specific plan for our visit there.

We finally broke off our planning session for dinner, after which Detlef and Susanne dropped by for a visit. We were glad to get to see Susanne and it is always a pleasure to see Detlef. He not only brought by the user manual for the cell phone he had loaned us earlier, but he had also driven over in his Smart car so that I could get a chance to drive it, which I did. As Detlef put it, a Smart car "drives like a go-kart" since it has such a short, square wheelbase and such tiny tires. However, the suspension is actually quite good and I had a huge amount of excess headroom over me, at least 4-5 inches. The acceleration was quite adequate to keep up with German traffic despite the fact that Detlef's Smart had only a small diesel motor and I was driving it using the "automatic shift" option rather than shifting it manually as he did. I was very curious to find out if anybody had adapted the Smart car to run on straight vegetable oil, as in my mind that would be the most simple and direct conversion of sunlight to automotive power. After our drive Detlef worked on his parent's computer a bit before we all sat down to have a "Gemuetlich" evening snack together. Afterwards we had a nice family chat before they went home for the evening and we turned in for the night.

Monika: