Wanderung 30

(Bob) After wandering around the old school rooms a bit and looking at some of the antiques in the main building, we had breakfast in what was clearly an old classroom, packed our gear on our bikes, and pedaled off across the pretty Danish countryside.

Our route led us through the small city of Sakskobing, which lies at the lower end of a long fjord coming down from the North. Although picturesque, the fjord prevents cars (or bicycles!) crossing over any further to the North. In Sakskobing we found both Aldi and Lidl grocery stores, sitting almost next to each other, for obvious competitive reasons. Although Lidl has a better assortment of non-food items, the prices for food are often slightly cheaper at Aldi, and that's where we ended up purchasing our afternoon sandwiches and supplies to make our evening meal.

I had wanted to follow the northern coastline of Lolland over to Bandolm, a small port on the North coast, but it turned out there was simply no way to do that-->the roads all ran North-South and then just dead-ended at the seashore rather than turning East-West. So instead we followed a minor highway West to Hunseby and saw many farmhouses and more of those pretty Danish churches we had visited earlier. Just after Hunseby we passed the entrance to the Knuthenborg Safari Park, which Gustl had mentioned was worth seeing, but we were anxious to get on to our hotel so we kept going, saving it for another day.

We did, however, stop to eat our sandwiches where train tracks for an antique steam railroad crossed the highway. I had found out that the train only ran on Sundays in May, or we would have ridden into Maribo instead and then taken the steam train from Maribo to Bandholm with our bicycles, which sounded like loads of fun. Oh well.

Riding an old steam train would, as it turned out, also have been a LOT safer than riding our bikes into town! The final section of highway into Bandholm was a major highway with no shoulders and every bicyclist's nightmare, big gravel trucks roaring by. This being Denmark, the gravel trucks really did edge over in the lane as much as they could to avoid us, but when there was oncoming traffic they could only edge over so far and we were jostled thoroughly by the winds of their passing. Yikes!

We persevered to Bandholm , but were profoundly grateful to safely get off our bikes at the hotel. Unfortunately our room was not yet ready, so we wandered around and explored the town for an hour or so. A big bulk cargo type of ship was unloading gravel in the harbor, which explained the continuous stream of gravel trucks we had to endure on the highway into town, and clearly they exported grain from the port as someone was cleaning those concrete storage bunkers by blasting out the chaff with compressed air.

The harbor also had a small marina with several fiberglass recreational sailboats and maybe one old wooden working fishing boat, I wasn't sure. We also found the ferry dock and a curious camouflage-painted ferry tied up at the pier, but that turned out to be an old Finnish military ferry that a local group of divers had purchased as a dive ship.

We also saw the old train station which was the terminus for the antique steam locomotive from Maribo, but it was deserted aside from bicyclists using it as a temporary picnic area. After an hour of wandering around Bandholm, our room was prepared and we were tired enough to gratefully settle in for the night.