Wanderung 32

We were both worried about how the day would turn out, but for entirely different reasons! I was worried about taking two heavily loaded bicycles on a series of trains out to Hafkrug, because I was sincerely hoping that all the connections would go as planned. Monika, on the other hand, was worried that since we had not transferred money to the rental agency for a down payment, that they would cancel our reservation and rent it to someone else. As we were well off-season, I wasn't too worried about that scenario and since I had withdrawn enough cash to cover our bill, I wasn't worried about paying for it, either.

But for me the reliability of the elevators that we absolutely depended on to get us down to train station platforms and back up again, was very much in doubt, especially after I found the only elevator from the S1 line at Hauptbahnhof up to the main train platform was "Defekt!" (English: "out of order!"). Fortunately, Monika devised an alternative plan where we would take the U1 subway from Ohlsdorf to Haupbahnhof , and I had checked the previous evening that the elevator to the U1 platform out in Ohlsdorf was functioning. But I couldn't be sure about the elevator at the Hauptbanhof end, and didn't know how many elevators we would take in the course of our series of trains.

In the end, we took 5 elevators between the three legs of our train trip: 1 at Ohlsdorf , 3 at Hauptbahnhof Hamburg, and 2 at Hauptbahnhof Luebeck. Fortunately they were all working that day, so although they made switching trains rather cumbersome , trains were running so frequently that we had no problem catching the next one at each stage. We even took advantage of our layover in Hauptbahnhof Luebeck to have lunch in the bakery in the station. So we traveled from 9:30 to about 1:00 to get to Hafkrug, where the station was at ground level and didn't require yet another elevator, thank goodness.

We found the rental agency at number 6 Bahnhofstrasse , and the lady there did not want to accept a credit card but was quite happy to take cash and give us the keys to Detlef and Susanne's rental condo. We cycled over to the parking garage there and parked our ebikes where the car would normally go and then unpacked our saddlebags. Bicycle saddlebags aren't all that large, so there wasn't all that much to unpack!

We later drove over to a new Sky grocery store to stock up on the essentials like milk, orange juice, bread, rolls, and the non-essentials like beer, wine, and potato chips. After Kaffeetrinken I took some time to start fine-tuning the bicycles for our upcoming journey: I raised Monika's seat, fixed the mounting of her new front basket, and shifted the saddlebags on my bike rearward so that my heels did not scrape against them while riding, which I had found extremely irritating.

After a light supper we settled in for an evening of reading together and poking around the Internet (provided free with the condo rent--Thank you, Detlef and Susanne!) with our iPads as the sun set very slowly in the West and the lights came on in the campground across the fields out in back.

When we awakened, I saw frost on the field out in back of us and a light layer of ground fog, implying it was bloody cold out there! Nevertheless, it was time to try out our bikes in earnest, and Monika remembered a Lidl store up in Neustadt which would hopefully have both groceries and bicycle stuff that we might use such as bike lights, clothes, etc. So we started North along the shoreline bicycle path to Sierksdorf, where we switched to the street with the cars. Suddenly I saw one of those radar-speed-display units at the shoulder of the street. Most such radar units in the USA just display your speed and maybe flash the display if your are over the limit, but much to my surprise this one displayed FACES after displaying your speed. The car ahead of me was going 30 or 31 kph, and the unit flashed a brilliant yellow frowning face after displaying his speed. Well that caught my attention, so I carefully watched as I rode by. It displayed 16 kph for my speed and then flashed a big smiling bright green face at me! Good golly Miss Molly! But actually I was glad to have the electronic speedometer on my ebike confirmed as correctly calibrated as it was also displaying 16 kph at that moment.

But then we took a wrong turn out of Sierksdorf and had to backtrack and find the correct route, which took a bit of time, but finally we got around the curious Hansa Park amusement park and rode on to the outskirts of Neustadt. Unfortunately, once again we got confused and took different routes, but neither of us found the Lidl store (a Google search later showed the Lidl store across the river on the other side of Neustadt ). Frustrated, we settled for an Aldi store which had equally good food options but no bicycle pieces. But Monika found some AAA batteries that I needed to get her bicycle lights working, and I found some shoelaces that looked like they might make a strap for the passport bag I was making to put under my shirt---the shoelaces were on sale for 40 cents, but that was for a package of 6 so I was probably going to have 5 left over!

The return route to Haffkrug was navigationally much simpler as we now remembered some of the turns, but I was really getting tired the closer we got to home, possibly because I was out of shape and possibly because I was getting very hungry as it was almost 1 pm by this time. But we got home at last and took all the food plus my bicycle battery inside, and Monika warmed up some frikadellen for lunch while I put my battery on to charge. We both wolfed down the frikadellen and some nice German potato salad with pickles and onions, and some German chocolate cookies for desert. Yum!

Mission accomplished, we settled in to rest for the afternoon by playing with our iPads in the sunny back room of our condo while I charged our bike batteries in preparation for our next outing. As we had brilliant sunshine in the afternoon , I also took out an emergency sewing kit and sewed one of the shoelaces onto the passport bag at one side. Fortunately, I recalled how to tie a bowline knot, which forms a loop that does not tighten up, because a loop was just what I needed to hook into a clasp already sewed into one side of the bag. The shoelace around my neck felt surprisingly soft, and I adjusted the loop so that the bag would rest on my chest comfortably . Then I noticed I had a hole in my right stocking, so I just threaded some black thread and sewed that shut while I had the good light.

Physically, we both had muscles that were tightening up after being used for the bicycling, so we also went out in the nice sunlight for an afternoon stroll over into the center of Haffkrug, looking for an ATM machine. We finally found one, but it would only let us withdraw a stingy 100 Euros. Still, it was a beautiful afternoon and we walked along the beach to savor the scene. Despite the chill in the air, folks were at the beach playing around, although no one was actually in the even colder water as yet!

Back home, we has sandwiches for supper and read for a few hours before turning in for the night.

It was cloudy and threatening an occasional rain shower during the morning, so we stayed inside and worked on our iPads for a couple of hours. But finally we bicycled over to Timmendorfer Strand along the coastline bicycle path, which gave us nice views of the Luebeck Bay to the East. Along the way South we saw a seaside hut being re-thatched with bundles of long reeds tied together and then laid down on the wooden roof frame and fastened in place. We asked how long the roof would last, and the thatcher said 50 years. That surprised me because how can such a roof avoid rotting out from the water seeping down in between those reads and allowing fungus and stuff to grow and destroy the roof?

Occasionally we had to ride with the cars in the street, but I felt MUCH safer than I would have while riding on similar streets in the USA! Several times I noticed both car and truck drivers intentionally slow down or stop a maneuver like a turn, simply to give us more time to cross the street in front of them. So the drivers here are not only more aware of bicycle riders, but they are also more willing to graciously give the right of way to them. I speculate that this courtesy is in part because almost all Germans grow up riding a bicycle, and thus all the adult German drivers understand how much effort it is to stop and start a bicycle again. Perhaps because they know this, they are much readier to let us proceed without stopping rather than insisting on the "Rules Of The Road" and making us stop for them. There may, of course, also be legal rights of cars vs bicycles in Germany that I don't know about. In any case, it makes riding a bicycle feel much safer in Germany or Denmark than in the USA.

Continuing on past Scharbeutz, we reached Timmendorfer Strand where we curled around a seaside spa of some kind and then rode uphill a block or two to find a Famila store that also conveniently had an Aldi right next door. Talk about two-stop shopping! (or is that "one-stop" shopping?)

The Famila store included a bakery that offered ready-made open-faced sandwiches, so we had one of those before heading home. On the way back we were being followed by a rainstorm, so we kept the speed up (using more motor assistance) and did, in fact avoid getting dumped on. We had ridden only about 13 km compared to 15 km the first day, and the seaside path was mostly dead flat, so it was a lot less strenuous and our bicycle batteries charged up in a little over an hour compared to the two hours it had taken the previous day. I was relieved that so far the one charger we had was successfully charging both of our batteries every evening without overheating, as that would be critical for our trip up the Elbe.

That evening we finished up Krentz's book "Flash" before the "Tageschau" evening TV news program. The German (Allgemeine Deutsche Rundfunk) station condenses local, regional, national, and international news into a fast-paced 15-minute period from 8:00-8:15 pm, which I wish some station would do in the USA! After that brief dose of reality, we escaped by reading an old Nora Roberts romance novel which was, however, new to us.

One relaxing thing about the condo in Haffkrug is the view out over the meadow and trees in back. Shortly after dawn we can often see a family of deer grazing on the lush grass out there, and on this morning we also saw a pair of geese, which was a bit more unusual.

After breakfast we once again headed North to Neustadt, in part because we wanted to finally get to that Lidl store, but more importantly to get cash from the branch of the Commerzbank there. The Commerzbank branch turned out to be right off the main town square that is just uphill from the harbor and next to the picturesque old city church, an area that we had visited before in Wanderung 30 before we cycled up into Denmark.

But getting cash was more difficult than Monika had expected as that was a small branch and didn't have cash on hand! Instead, they gave Monika a kind of temporary cash card and arranged to have the money placed in the ATM machine overnight, so we could come back the next morning and get it from the ATM machine! Wow, how convoluted! What forces us to carry large amounts of cash in Germany is that most B&Bs do not accept checks, credit cards, or American debit cards, so we have to pay in cash. Germans are now using direct bank account to bank account transfers, but giving out our bank account number makes me very nervous given the lack of security in electronic systems in the USA, and so we are forced into using cash.

Our banking completed, at least for the day, we walked over to a narrow little shopping lane that leads over to a small section of the old town wall, which still has a pretty little town gate in it. We found a 1 Euro store and had fun browsing around all the cheap stuff there. Monika picked up a couple of cute plastic eating boards: hers had a Greek goddess on it and mine a rather handsome looking Centaur with a bow and arrow. When we took them back to the bikes, I ascertained that they just might also function as bottom plates for my bicycle saddlebags.

You see, I have really nice, big nylon saddlebags on the back of my bike that are light and very capacious, BUT they tend to droop down around the bicycle's rear wheel axle when fully loaded. Also, I was still having some trouble with my heels hitting the front of the side bags while I was pedaling although I had already shifted the bags as far back as they would go on the luggage rack in back. So now I tried to kind of sew the front of the side bags up a bit so that the front would effectively be back another inch or two. The plastic boards Monika had found appeared to be the perfect size for me to insert in the bottom of each side bag to make the bag a bit wider but crucially also a bit shorter front-to-back so that I could get more clearance for my feet whilst pedaling.

Continuing on into Neustadt, we finally did find the Lidl there, and that store fortuitously had Ritter Sport chocolate on sale for 79 cents per 100 gram package. You can FIND Ritter Sport also in the USA, but in Germany you find many more varieties of it than you would in the USA such as "Honig-Salz-Mandel" (English: honey + salt + almonds) and "Rum Trauben Nuss" (English: rum + grape + nuts). So we picked up 7 or 8 packages of Ritter Sport, some fresh eggs, and some pizza-bread things to eat on our way home. Riding back into downtown Neustadt, we found a park bench along the side of the river and stopped to have a nice snack of those pizza breads before retracing our path to Haffkrug.

We relaxed that afternoon but went over to Detlef and Susanne's new condo in Scharbeutz that evening. I helped Detlef install a new lamp, and then they invited us out to dinner at a fish restaurant right on the beach. I had a flounder cooked "Finkenwerder style", which Detlef showed me how to de-bone, and that was important as there are a LOT of bones in a flounder! We returned to their new rental condo and cleaned up a bit while a carpenter came by to re-install some closet doors that he had repainted and refinished. They drove us back down to Haffkrug but left directly afterwards as they had an hour's drive to get home and both of them had to get to work bright and early the next morning. Due to the fatigue of the bike riding and the excitement of seeing some fun relatives, we were exhausted and collapsed into bed shortly thereafter.

We walked over to Sky in the morning to see what their bakery offered, and as you would expect from a good German bakery, they had both good breakfast rolls as well as terribly sweet things like streusel rolls and "raisin snails". After breakfast, I retrieved some of our old bike pieces from Detlef's condo cellar and checked them out. Finding two headlights that worked, I mounted those on our handlebars before we set off on our first errand of the day.

Today we had a full schedule because first we had agreed to pick up two bicycles that Detlef had acquired with his new condo and had repaired for the use of his future guests. The ride over to Scharbeutz, picking up the bicycles, riding them back to the condo, and locking them in the condo garage there all took a bit of time, but I garnered one very interesting nugget of information. I had noticed a huge selection of new Giant brand ebikes at the bike shop, and I asked the owner what percent of ebikes versus normal bikes he sold last year. He said that he sold over 50% ebikes, and since they run 2000-3000 Euros each, that high percentage of sales is quite impressive.

Retrieving our own ebikes, we chugged uphill to an Aldi in Scharbeutz to buy lunch, but we thought the sandwiches we had seen at Sky that morning looked a little better, so we ended up just buying another set of AAA NIMH batteries. Aldi was selling a set of 8 of them for only 3.99 Euros, which was only about twice as much as the AAA alkaline batteries. The NIMH AAAs were pre-charged, so we could use them just like new alkaline batteries, but without the danger of them leaking and destroying the circuit connections, which I had found had happened with some of the bicycle lights that I had left in Germany with the alkaline batteries inside.

So we detoured past Sky on the way back home to pick up lunch and dinner sandwiches, and while we had lunch , we contemplated our next agenda item, which was to ride back to Neustadt to pick up cash as Monika had arranged the day before. It had been extremely windy and rather cold during our morning walk and ride to Scharbeutz, and the ride to Neustadt would be about 3 times as long. In the end, we waited a bit for it to warm up and the wind to abate, and then rode up to Neustadt to retrieve Monika's cash.

Succeeding in that, we rested before the ride back and decided to peruse the offerings in the 1-euro store again. We were glad we did as I found some hose clamps and plastic pieces which I thought I could use to mount the old tail lights I had found and tested that morning on our bikes. Monika had found a USB port light and some napkins, which we were desperately short of. I also found those little LED lights that fit around your head on an elastic band for walking at night for only 1 euro, and decided to take a chance on one of those (surprisingly, it worked).

We were both tired by the time we reached home as we had put 25 kilometers on our bikes, so we both wanted to rest after Kaffeetrinken, but I couldn't stop myself from trying to mount the tail lights on the bikes. I lfinally succeeded, so we now have battery-powered front and rear lights which should be safer, but only time will tell if the mountings I made are really good enough.

We had thought to ride our bikes up to Eutin in the area of hills and lakes that is just inland from the Baltic coast here, but we were both just too tired to do that. Instead we used the day to rest and of course I continued to work on the bicycles. That had its ups and downs. I was putting Monika's front basket on and noticed that the new headlight interfered a bit, so I tried to just nudge it over and the plastic mounting broke. Nuts! Casting about for a replacement, I found that the 1 euro headlamp we had just bought in Neustadt would kind of loop around the front fender on her bike and hopefully stay in position (but it didn't!).

The main activity was to sew the corners of my bike's saddlebags to the thin piece of plywood that acted as a floor for the main compartment, and so avoid the sagging of the side bags. Having drilled some holes in the edges in preparation for this eventuality back home, I set to sewing each corner of the bags to the wood reinforcement piece. It seemed to work but only time will tell how it all holds up! My problem here is that I don't have my usual set of tools and work benches to create custom fittings to make things work better, and having to "make do"' with limited tools and no workbench is a bit frustrating. Just to take one example, the cable adjustments on my bike are not usable because I don't have simple pliers to twist the knurled adjustment nuts tight.

Our main excitement of the day was Detlef, Heinke, and Gustl driving up from Hamburg for Kaffeetrinken. We bought bakery items and some more coffee pads for the coffee maker in preparation for their visit, but we also looked carefully through all our stuff and ruthlessly separated out unnecessary items. We put all of our excess stuff in the large barrel bag that Monika had been strapping to the top of her saddlebags in the back, but then handed that bag off to Heinke and Gustl for storage when they came (Thank you, Heinke and Gustl!). By removing that bag from Monika's bike, we hoped to thereby reduce both the bulk and weight that she had to manage on her bicycle and thus make it easier for her to handle.

It surely was fun to see them our Hamburg relatives again, though! We laughed our way through Kaffeetrinken and then took a walk along the beach--that was the first time we had done so as we had been so busy doing other preparations during this week. Heinke suggested taking off our shoes and wading into the Baltic Sea, but everyone except Detlef declined as we all anticipated at it would be bloody cold. Detlef, however, was game and shed his shoes and socks to wade in with her. They didn't stay in too long, because it was in fact bloody cold water!

After returning to our condo for a bit, the others drove back to Hamburg for the evening and it was just the two of us again by the time dinner rolled around. We walked over to the Sky store and bought sandwiches for the evening and rolls for our meal the next morning. During the evening we talked to Martin using FaceTime, and it was nice to both see him and get the latest news from him and Tanya. We also received an email from Judson, but it looked like we would just miss each other as he would be In Hamburg at the end of April on the exact days we were in Berlin getting ready for our flight home. (After much long-distance discussion, however, we managed to synchronize our schedules and meet Judson in Hamburg at the end of our bicycle trip! Stay tuned, Wanderungs fans!)