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Monday April 17: Tangermuende to Bertingen
Heading south from Tangermuende, our bike path rejoined the dike beside the Elbe for a while, but then veered inland a bit to take a straighter course southwards. Although we had nice views of the Elbe at some places, and nice trails in the woods in other places, it was quite cold with the occasional shower, which when riding a bicycle is a perfect recipe for hypothermia!
So we both were having trouble keeping warm, especially our fingers. The problem with keeping our fingers warm was that we needed enough dexterity both to steer and to operate the controls on our bicycles. The steering and the brake levers could conceivably be operated with mittens, but we also had to operate bells, lights, and the electric motor controls that consist of push buttons , and those absolutely cannot be operated unless you are wearing gloves. So we both wore thin gloves, but gloves just don't keep your fingers warm in a cold rain and wind.
We were also low on food as we had not been able to buy any more, so I kept my eyes peeled for anyplace that would either sell food or serve us a meal on this official Easter Monday holiday. I didn't have any luck with any open grocery stores, bakeries, or even filling stations for cry eye, until I finally spotted an ice cream store that had flags out front, which in Germany means that it was open. Well now, we were both cold enough to be almost shivering, so of course we were not particularly interested in ice cream per se, but we stopped on the off chance that the shop would also sell some kind of warm, or at least not freezing cold, food.
And fortunately they did in fact have an extremely limited luncheon menu, but it was exactly 1 bowl of soup, 1 main course of beef, and 1 dessert of, you guessed it , ice cream! Well, beggars can't be choosers, so we both signed up for the full three course luncheon and held our hands on the heater next to our table to loosen them up while we waited for our soup. The soup, main dish, and ice cream dessert were excellent, and although the service was very slow we did mind that at all as we spent intervening time between courses warming our hands on that heater! When our food finally arrived, the servings were sufficiently generous that we took the leftovers with us to eat that evening just in case we couldn't find any other food source that afternoon.
Which we didn't! But we did pull in at a memorial to sailors lost on the Elbe as we once again came alongside the shores of the river that afternoon. Curiously, I don't think of losing lives on river navigation as much as I do of sailing across oceans, but certainly those sailors are also lost in the line of duty and deserve to be remembered just as much.
I should also mention that in some places farmers were grazing their sheep and cattle almost up to the bicycle path on top of the dike. They would erect flimsy fences of plastic mesh or netting barely attached to some thin sticks stuck in the ground. Well, sheep and cows don't really tend to stray that much, apparently, so those flimsy fences seemed to do the trick and keep the animals from straying onto the cycle way, and I had no worries as they are non-aggressive sorts at heart even if they did wander in front of us.
However, at one point we came up on a herd of sheep in one such temporary pen beside the bike path, and that herd was protected by a really big and very watchful sheep dog. And I don't mean one of those itty bitty sheep dogs like a border collie, this boy was huge--I think it was the German Hovawarth breed of sheep dog, the ones big enough to fight off wolves and such. And it turned out he thought we were a threat to his sheep, so he came at us barking and growling his head off. What saved us is that Hovawarths are also big-headed, intelligent dogs and this one had apparently been trained to stay just inside that flimsy fence. Thank goodness, as that boy could have easily either leaped the 2-foot high fence or just crashed through it and had at us. Needless to say, we just kept steadily pedaling and avoiding eye contact until we had left him and his herd safely behind us! (Thus no pictures!)
We also passed horse riders on the path, and they were very good about pulling off with their horses and calming them as we went whirring by. Possibly the horses were just spooked at our motion and our lights, but I also suspect that our motors are putting out a very high pitched whine that we cannot really hear but which many animals, including dogs, horses, and possibly deer, can hear. That high pitch is probably very unusual and possibly either frightening or irritating for them, which would explain some of the reactions of the animals we saw on our trip to our otherwise very quiet bicycles.
We finally arrived in our hotel in the woods on the banks of the Alte Elbe, or Old Elbe, which appeared to be a complex of little lakes formed in the shape of a broad curve somewhat like the oxbows in the Mississippi River basin that were created when the river suddenly changed course in the past. We were in one of 8 outlying cabin complexes located in the woods, each cabin having four suites of rooms. And boy was this hotel set up to accommodate bicyclists! The well marked bicycle parking shed had two very long rooms with 22 slots for bicycles, so a total of 44 bikes could be stored there! We also had sufficient extra space in our suite that we could have just rolled our bikes in the front door and left them in our rooms, which was very tempting. But you have to figure that then the cleaning lady would have to clean the extra dirt that the bike tires would inevitably track in, and it just wasn't fair to do that.
We finished our lunch leftovers combined with the rest of our knaeckebrot for dinner, and had the absolute last pieces of licorice candy and cookies for dessert. That meant that we were finally down to a couple chocolate Easter Eggs and a few pretzel sticks for our food supply, which was pretty slim pickings!
Tuesday April 18: Bertingen to Glindenberg
We were greeted in the morning by a dark overcast sky and steady light but cold rain, which decreased my enthusiasm for riding our bicycles considerably. So I dawdled over a very nice German breakfast buffet, and afterwards we both still sat at the table and played around with our iPads, as we could get "WLAN " (English: Wifi) there but not out in our cabin. Still, the normal checkout time is 10:00, and we finally turned in our key and headed off down the bike path shortly thereafter.
We again had nice views of the floodplain of the Elbe for a while, followed by some forest paths. But it was downright chilly riding in the cold drizzle, so when I found an open bakery in Rogatz and saw that they had two tables with chairs, we stopped to have coffee and rolls for "elevenses" as the British would put it. Seeing that they also had some prepared sandwiches, we also picked up two of those to go just in case we couldn't find anything else to eat that evening. Unfortunately, the ferry across the Elbe in Rogatz was in for repairs, so we could not ferry across to where the main bicycle trail along the Elbe River wound around along the other bank.
Instead, we had to keep on our side of the river to find our next night's hotel in the small town of Glindenberg. On the whole, the Komoot bicycle-routing app did an excellent job of finding the most feasible direct path there. (We had also considered a more indirect path that hugged the shoreline of the Elbe on our side, but it was much longer and neither of us felt like spending an extra hour riding in the cold rain.) Komoot routed us along paved paths alongside the dikes and sometimes just through farmers' fields. As far as I could tell, most of those paths were just access roads of some kind, maybe to facilitate getting tractors and other farm machinery into and out of the field, but there was zero traffic on them.
We were quite surprised as we rode along the paved track between a dike and a field, when a big stag came bolting over the top of the dike and went racing pell-mell across the track in front of us, and then continued galloping over the field to our left. We went a little further and then three more slightly smaller deer came galloping over the dike, across the path and away over the field, apparently to be with their leader. We both rode rather gingerly past that point, keeping a sharp eye out to our right to see if there would be any more deer in that herd that would come suddenly galloping down on us. Monika was actually afraid of a collision, which would have certainly injured us or our bikes, but I thought they would probably just gallop around us if we stopped dead as they are no doubt used to dodging around obstacles, so for me it was the inconvenience of having to slam on the brakes.
But at one point Komoot routed us directly on a busy 2-lane highway, and that made me feel like a duck in a shooting gallery! We both kicked up the motor support a notch to get out of that situation as quickly as possible, but there were several kilometers where we just had to endure the traffic. Thank goodness for the truly bicycle-considerate German drivers, or it would have been extremely unpleasant if not downright dangerous. If there was no oncoming traffic, they would move almost completely over into the other lane to give us maximal space. If there was oncoming traffic, they would stop short behind us and wait for a gap in the oncoming traffic to safely pass us. That included the big trucks like gravel trucks, and when they screeched to a halt just behind me to wait for passing room, I could really hear their big diesel motor chugging along just in back of me, which kind of raised the hair on the back of my neck, but they NEVER pushed close to me and NEVER blew their horn or anything. Phew!
Still, all it would have taken is one impatient jackass to put us in jeopardy , so when I saw an alternative rural lane in the fields to our left on the Komoot display, I made the executive decision to immediately take it. It was, as I had seen on the display, slightly longer in distance, but it it was one of those farm access paths which had zero traffic and this one was nicely paved so we didn't have to worry about slipping in the mud. In fact, we found a curious "Gnome Hill" along that rural route with a rather nice collection of gnomes beside the road.
We reached Glindenberg right before Noon, and after warming up again with a relaxed meal in the restaurant attached to our hotel (very comfortable or "Gemuetlich"), we signed in and moved our stuff up to our very nice and spacious room. I was also happy that they had a garage to store our bikes, because the rain just isn't good for the electronics on them.
After collapsing for a bit and thoroughly warming up, we did rouse ourselves to wander up and down the Main Street (only street) of the town. They folks had erected historical plaques about the city, which I had some trouble puzzling out but which had some very interesting stories.
As we returned to our hotel, I heard the "clack, clack, clack" sound that the big black and white storks use as their call (they are otherwise mute), and busily looked at all the chimneys around us as he sounded quite near. Imagine my surprise when I finally looked down and spotted him stalking along the bus stop shelter just across the street from us! We both stopped to try to get pictures as he was really close, but that seemed to make him shy off a bit, and we finally saw him fly up to a nearby nest on a pole and converse with Mrs Stork about nest renovations, apparently.
We also saw a couple houses down the block from our hotel, an extremely modern black box of a house with Chinese terra cotta warriors at the front entrance and a two-foot thick fence made of stones contained in a wire mesh like retaining walls on some highways in the USA. It looked as much like a fortress as much as a home, and finding that in a small village in Germany totally puzzled me.
But the only town bakery we could find on our walk was closed, either temporarily or permanently, so in the end we had to use the sandwiches we had bought earlier in the day for our evening snack along with the last of our pretzels and all but one of the chocolate eggs. We also finished our book that evening, and as it was a cracking good yarn that was a nice way to spend a couple hours before bedtime.
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