Wanderung 32

Epilog: Home at last!

Eberhard had arranged for a taxi to pick us up at 7:00 and drive us to the airport, and this being Germany he arrived 5 minutes ahead of time. The route to the airport only required about 15 minutes as Eberhard had advised us, but as Birgit said, we like to be early and eat at the airport rather than try to eat first at home and worry about being late to the airport and missing our fight! So as a result, we were in fact quite early, breezed through security, and spent some time having a ham and cheese baguette plus some orange juice for breakfast before boarding a Boeing 737 for the hop over to Amsterdam. We enjoyed seeing the sun glinting on the watery landscape around Amsterdam as we approached for the landing.

The flight to Amsterdam's Schiphol airport only took a little over an hour, so we had plenty of time to walk from Terminal C for local European flights to Terminal F where we boarded a much larger aircraft for our long, trans-Atlantic flight home to Washington. As usual, we were very happy just to find our house still standing after such a long trip, and surprisingly about 1/2 of the plants that we had planted in the yard the day we left were still living! (Along with a large number of happy, healthy weeds, of course!) After turning on the water and electricity and adjusting the thermostat back to normal, we gratefully laid our tired, jet-lagged bodies down to sleep on our old, familiar bed!

Lessons learned:

The weather: Germany in April can have occasional sunny and warm days, but much more likely is the cold, rainy wet weather we encountered for most of our bicycle trip. I had only brought 1 long-sleeved shirt with, and ended up wearing the shirt almost every day of our bike trip! That's not so bad if you can wash it out each evening and dry it out overnight, but otherwise it can get unpleasant. Our rain shells we also ended up wearing almost every day, either for rain protection or for the simple warmth of having an outermost wind-proof layer on the cold, windy days. So having at least one washable long sleeve shirt, a rain shell, and several lightweight sweaters (I usually wore one or two light sweaters under the rain shell) is a must.

Although you may think rainproof pants would also be necessary, they were not as our (polyester) pants would typically dry off after the rain showers due to the wind and the heat we were generating by bicycling. Cotton fabrics do not breathe right and do not dry easily, so they would NOT be suitable for any of these layers. In the future, however, scheduling our bike trips in May or September would seem to be a better bet! (Summer has a lot of vacationing Germans on those bike paths, and it might be harder to find accommodations!)

Accommodations: there are a LOT of small hotels, B&Bs, hostels, and so forth along most of the bike routes, but you have to know where to find them and how to book them. Booklets with the location, price category, and contact info are published in German for many of these bike routes, and those are a gold mine of potential places to stay. In particular, look for the "bike friendly" or "bed and bike" type of accommodation because those places will always offer a secure, under-roof type of storage for your bike at no extra charge. Particularly for electric bikes, I think keeping them out of the rain overnight is very wise to avoid electrical problems.

We used the bookings.com and hotels.de websites to reserve our rooms 1-3 days in advance, which was possible as all of the places we stayed ADVERTISED free "WLAN " or Wifi. However, the signal strength in some places was so weak and inconsistent that it was impossible to use. So reserving two nights ahead in front of your current position on your route might be advisable. And when a German holiday is coming up, you should consider booking ahead until the end of that holiday as the Germans are out enjoying the cycle routes and booking many of the accommodations also!

German Holidays: Germans have more holidays than Americans, and they like to use them to travel! So two problems occur on holiday weekends: it's hard to find a place to stay and it's hard to buy food to eat. We were caught by the Easter weekend, which extends from Friday to the following Monday, and we basically ran out of food. However, the small bakeries, cafes, and bars are often open on holidays, as that's where the Germans go out to eat, so you can usually find someplace where you can at least get a meal. If the place has a menu that offers a "Tagesgericht" or "Tageskarte" (English: "daily special"), you might give that a try as those house specialties are usually quite good and relatively inexpensive in our experience.

Safety: the German drivers are very understanding of bicyclists and tolerant in giving the bicycle the right of way. Plus, most of the major roads have separate cycle ways alongside them. So out in the countryside the bicycle riding is usually safe, although I still felt very vulnerable when a big truck was right behind me waiting for a chance to pass! But in the city you must really know how to ride your bicycle! The allowed cycle ways in a city will veer unpredictably from the street to the sidewalk and not always be well marked. Furthermore, there will always be things like sign posts, street lamps, and god knows what obstructions lying in wait for you along the path. So the net bottom line is that you must really have decent reflexes and be in total control of your bicycle! Having a bike weighed down with a battery, a motor, and a couple weeks' worth of clothing and supplies makes that control considerably more difficult, so practice like our first few days in Haffkrug is advisable. And for heaven's sake wear a helmet because if you hit something, your head will often be the contact point!

What you will see: Bicycling is a GREAT way to see a small section of a country very thoroughly. The necessary components are having a safe cycle route, being able to find food and accommodations every 30 kilometers or so (depending on your fitness level, your bike, the terrain, the weather, etc), and having an assortment of things to see and visit along the way. What is so great about bicycling is that you can easily stop to see anything interesting along the way, and you can always find a place to lock up your bicycle by chaining it to the nearest post or railing, unlike a car where you have to find and often pay for a parking space.

While biking you are immersed in the environment about the same as you are when walking, except you are moving about 15-20 kilometers per hour while biking rather than 4-6 kilometers per hour while walking. You still have enough time to take in everything around you, unlike a car, but you can also kind of hustle through the boring bits if you take a mind to, which you can't do while walking. So we find biking an ideal compromise for seeing places that have a decent cycling infrastructure plus a decent density of things to do and see along the way, such as Germany and Denmark (see Wanderung 30). I should probably add Holland, Ireland, Belgium, and France to that list, but those who have really cycled there would know that better than I do. Cheers and safe travels to you! And if you get a chance, send us some pictures of your journey!