Wanderung 30

The day dawned nice and sunny for a change, so we decided to get out and about although we still had to cope with the occasional shower during the day! Monika's face was still heavily bruised, but the swelling was going way down and she was feeling much perkier, which boded well for continuing our bike trip the next day. For our last day in Flensburg, we decided to see the Maritime Museum complex that is located in the old harbor section.

So after another hearty breakfast, we toured the main building of the Maritime Museum. It had a gift shop on the first floor, where we found a pretty little brass ship with salt and pepper shakers that fit into it, which we picked up for Detlef, but then had to carry in our saddlebags until we got back to Hamburg! The second floor of the main building was a set of exhibits that detailed the history of the port of Flensburg with a large diorama of the city in the middle of the room, and many exhibits about ship building in the old days.

Around the walls were ship models and even early navigational aids.

The exhibits on the second floor were complemented by a movie shown down in the basement area. It turned out that Flensburg had started out first as a Baltic Sea fishing port, but then became a transhipment port for goods travelling from the Baltic Sea over to the Atlantic ocean, say to England, France, or Spain. From Flensburg, freight just had to be transhipped a few kilometers by wagon to reach the North Sea coast, where it could be reloaded onto other ships for the Atlantic leg of the journey. That short cut saved the huge loop up through the islands of Denmark and then around the Jutland peninsula that the ships would be otherwise oblliged to sail, and apparently saved time and money. Since some of the loads coming back from the Caribbean were molasses, some Flensburg merchants started making rum and the town became the capital of rum making in Germany.

Unfortunately, the transhipment trade ended when the huge canal connecting the Baltic Sea to the North Sea was cut straight across the northern neck of Germany in 1895 and ships could just sail or steam directly across without the trouble of unloading and reloading their cargo. When the canal took the transhipment business away, Flensburg sank back into being a sleepy little Baltic Sea port, but still made a darn good rum! After that rather unique history lesson, we walked up to the pedestrian area through one of the narrow streets, where the overhanging upper floors of some of the old houses showed that they were once used for warehouses. We had a pizza for lunch, but then came back to the museum looking for a public bathroom, not always an easy thing to find in Germany!

Much to our surprise, when we searched for bathrooms we found that there were two more museum buildings out in back of the main building that we had not seen! But there was nary a sign nor map at the museum to show that those extra buildings and exhibits existed! How strange! I was overjoyed to find more museum exhibits, although Monika was somewhat less so. In particular, I spent an hour in the one building that contained exhibits purely on the mechanical side of steamships. I exhaustively examined the old steam engines and various mechanical bits and pieces, while Monika rested on a bench. Fortunately for me (unfortunately for Monika) that building also housed a real, honest-to-god, full-sized and fully operational ship simulator to play with! Wow, did I have fun piloting a freighter out of Flensburg harbor and into the fjord while the young curator presented different wind, wave, and obstacle scenarios to challenge me. What fun! I was very impressed by how big ships steer ungodly slowly and have so much more momentum once they are moving compared to small airplanes!

Finally taking pity on Monika, I pried myself out of the mechanical exhibits and we visited the third and final building of the Maritime Museum. There we found miscellaneous nautical art collections, ship models, and other tidbits of maritime history including a section on the slave trade, but the second floor also featured a complete deckhouse cabin like on the old riverboats in the U.S. I had fun playing around in that, and it would have been gangbusters to have that deckhouse and helm hooked up to a riverboat simulator with display screens. I could have happily spent another couple hours piloting a steamboat up the River Elbe to Hamburg, for example, but no such luck.

At the end of the day, we crossed the street to the harborfront which had a small shipyard where they restore some of the old ships in the big wooden sheds. The curators (and volunteers, I assume) had also had built a brand new 3.5-1 scale model of a sailing ship that was just gorgeous in its functional detail. But that scale would be simply too small to really sail in the harbor, and the resulting ship was way too big to fit inside any building as a display, so I was rather puzzled about what exactly they had built it for?

In any case, we had a great day at the Maritime Museum, and Monika was feeling chipper enough that we made firm plans to leave Flensburg and once again forge our way North into Jutland the next morning on our ebikes.