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Friday, April 14: Wittenberge to Nitzow
In Germany, stores close over the Easter weekend, so we had planned to first ride over to Netto and buy a bunch of food to make sandwiches to hold us over the weekend. Unfortunately, both Netto and the Lidl store down the street from it were closed already on Good Friday! Argh! So we set off for the day keeping an eagle eye out for anyplace we could either buy a meal, or purchase some food to make our own meals.
Retracing our route to the hotel after that fruitless quest, we then crossed the rainbow-shaped bridge over the river leading to the harbor in Wittenberg and continued along the Elbe flood dike for quite a while, enjoying the ever-shifting wetland scenery from the dike to the riverbank. The unexpected always happens when we travel, and it pays to "Keep your powder dry!", or in our case, "Always have your camera ready!". We came across two swans peacefully swimming in a pond beside the trail, so Bob whipped his camera from his belt pouch and quickly took a picture. He probably spooked them and by the time Monika retrieved her camera from her pocket, they were already in the process of flying away!
But we also had a couple of jokers dealt to us along the path that morning. The first problem was some major road construction that was extensive enough to force a detour of the bike path. Fortunately, the detour was well marked, so we didn't get lost, but we did suddenly find ourselves riding along dirt roads leading across farmers' fields, and that is quite challenging as we have rather heavily loaded city bikes with normal skinny road tires rather than a mountain bike with fat, knobby tires. We were both just glad we weren't doing it in the rain, as that detour would have become muddy and really treacherous.
The second detour was for some kind of construction project on about a 60-foot section of the tar ail, but there was NO place for bikes to get by at that one. So we had to detour over to a nearby rural road about a block away, which thank goodness led in the same direction as the bike path. Serendipitously, we explored a nearby small town where we had hoped to find either a bakery or a grocery store, but instead located a mini-market next to a restaurant. We bought cheese, knaeckebrodt, and cookies, which, while in no way a balanced diet, will at least keep us from starving! The town billed itself as Stork town, and indeed we did see a stork on its nest. It also had a very pretty church.
We continued along the Elbe for a while but finally diverted eastward toward a military practice ground and a small town with our next vacation apartment. At the southern boundary of the military zone was a small memorial to branch of a concentration camp that had been located nearby. The camp used forced POW laborers and 771 interned Jews to build munitions and spare parts for the WWII German Army. As the war ended m the Jewish women were relocated to other concentration camps , but some of the men were sent on what was labeled as a Todesmarch (English: "Death March" ) to another camp. It was a sobering reminder of the atrocities of WWII, but I was cheered by the fact that someone still cared enough about these victims to plant fresh pansies in front of the memorial stone.
Becoming hungrier and hungrier, we also stopped twice at Gasthofs in little villages which were in fact open, but both times we were told that they just didn't have any seats available! Nuts! We were both tired and sore by the time we reached our apartment and signed in for the night, but we were rewarded by being able to watch a male stork preparing his nest for the arrival of his mate on top of the building behind us. Apparently the females arrive about 2 weeks later than the males and the males try to put the nest in good condition for that arrival and inspection!
After we waited an hour for the lunch crowd to dissipate, we walked back to the local Gasthof and this time they had spaces for us to sit and eat. It was a wonderful meal and I learned that schnitzel in the "Hamburg style" means you get a fried egg on top of the basic schnitzel, which was delicious!
Back at the apartment, we put all of our equipment on to charge and settled in for the night. Monika's battery was only at 60%, but mine was depleted down to 20% or less, so I had almost run out of battery capacity on this day's ride. Although we had ridden 35+ kilometers, that range limitation was still troubling, and I would have to carefully watch my battery use on our future rides.
Saturday, April 15: Nitzow to Klietz
When rain is forecast, sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you are not lucky. On this day we were unlucky that the rain was passing over us during our ride southwards to Klietz, where we had booked our next overnight stay. It was not a constant, steady rain, by any means, and that was a lifesaver because we could kind of dry off and warm up a bit while biking between the rain showers. Still, it was cold even then and we did not have the inclination to stop and wander around the interesting things we passed, which we usually do. Luckily there were shelters with picnic benches where we could wait during the worst of the rains. Some were quite artistic.
In particular, we hustled through the small city of Havelberg on the Havel River that feeds directly into the Elbe, and the city had some interesting landmarks. But it was raining at the time, and I just couldn't work up the enthusiasm to stop and wander around even such a pretty little city in a cold rain. Instead of stopping, we plowed onward, always with an eye out to finding any source of food as we knew most regular stores were closed for the next two days due to Easter Sunday and Easter Monday. Although Easter Monday has no real significance whatsoever, traditionally in Germany it has been and remains today a holiday, which means all normal stores are closed, including not only the Aldi and Lidl stores we patronize, but also local bakeries and Mom and Pop stores. Bars and restaurants are sometimes open, but sometimes closed, and the ones we passed on this day were all closed.
What finally saved our bacon was the fact that most German gas stations now have mini-markets inside them, and one item they sell is broetchen rolls cut in half and made up as sandwiches. So when we saw a gas station, we veered over to that side of the road and pulled up our bicycles in front. We went inside, bought some of those sandwiches, and sat down at a small table to enjoy them and warm up a bit. In retrospect, we should have bought extras for our evening meal, but we were so sure that we would find an open store of some kind that we set off without doing so.
That turned out to be a big mistake! We continued southward through the intermittent rain to our hotel in Klietz, which turned out to be a very nice place. The Landgut Seeblick was a large restaurant with a guesthouse.
Our room in the guesthouse had a balcony looking out over the entrance. We watched with wonder as a team of four horses pulling some kind of cart pulled up to the restaurant across from our hotel. Then one guy goes in and comes out with huge 1-liter steins of beer grasped in his hand. The three guys immediately down the tankards of beer, return the empty beer steins to the restaurant, and then trot off (literally!) down the street outside, waving to us up on our balcony.
The curious thing about the whole incident was that it made perfect sense given German drunk-driving laws and how strictly those laws are enforced: the very FIRST infraction of even just sitting in the driver's set with anything over .04 alcohol results in a big fine and your license being confiscated for the entire following year!! BUT THAT LAW DOESN'T APPLY TO DRIVING A HORSE CART AS IT IS NOT A MOTORIZED VEHICLE!! So if you are going to join up with your mates and drive to the local tavern to have a liter, it really makes sense to hook up a team of horses and drive the horse cart because at least that way you are all still legal! (It is these oddball twists of other cultures that makes me enjoy travelling so much.)
Our problem remained that we could not find a single open grocery store, bakery, or Imbiss (English: "Snack Bar" is closest) in the whole town! Argh! So in the end, we had knaeckebrodt, some cookies, pretzels, and a piece of chocolate for dinner. During our attempt to find food while walking around the town we did, however, find a unique type of windmill that had been restored to working order. This Bockmuehle was a steerable type of windmill that you could rotate around a base to point it into the wind. I have only seen one other windmill of this type, and that was at Colonial Williamsburg in the USA in the 1990s. This one was a bit larger, but built in exactly the same way with a "tail" on the leeward side that had a small wheel on it so that the whole thing could be rolled clockwise or counter clockwise to point the sails of the windmill directly into the prevailing wind on any given day.
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