Wanderung 32

The morning started out as dark, cold, cloudy, and damp, which is not our favorite biking weather, but at least it was not actively raining. We had a very nice, comfortable breakfast in the cafe in the front part of the Elbeflair Hotel. Then we took our sweet time packing up and hitting the bike trail because I, at least, was in no great hurry to cycle into potentially bad weather!

But finally about 10 am we ran out of excuses to put off departing and took off down the path on top of the dike. The wind was still strong and gusting out of the northwest, which was fortunate because that gave us a tailwind 90% of the time, and fighting a headwind that strong would have stressed both our (rather limited) endurance and the capacity of our motors' batteries.

The rain held off for most of the day, and we had beautiful views of the Elbe and the complex landscape of the Biosphere wetlands preserve between the dike and the river. We had both been afraid that riding along a riverbank would be quite dull after a while, and were pleasantly surprised that that was not the case at all. We saw a constantly changing landscape of little ponds, complete with ducks, geese, swans, Great Blue Herons, and the occasional stork; larger oxbows of water where the Elbe had changed course sometime in the past; and then little islands and ridges where the land just barely rose above the prevailing water table like it does in the Louisiana Bayou in the USA. Very interesting!

Overhead we were patrolled by crows in some areas, rather large mobs of 10-20 of them, and by kites in other areas, which were usually in pairs and soared about very much like small-scale vultures, which I suppose they are. But the avian highlight had to be a pair of storks building a big huge nest of sticks only about 30 feet inland from the bike path. We stopped to take pictures of course, but the pair was so intent on their work that they just completely ignored us. One was picking up sticks below the nest when we arrived and then he strode off about 20 feet from the nest with the sticks in his beak. I watched with interest, not being sure what he was doing, but it turned out that he was just getting to a clear space to make his long, loping run into the wind for a take off! I watched in amazement as he lifted himself up into the air with his sticks--big wingspan as these are BIG birds!--and then came down on the nest in a perfect 2-foot landing to add his sticks to it. What a sight! (And Mrs. Stork appeared to be very happy with the addition!)

We forged on to Lenzen past some very small villages like Moedlich, where an Dutch-born self-made man had become first an Admiral and then served the local Duke as a regional governor. He helped raise taxes to repair the dikes as far back as the 1650s and thereby earned enough emnity from the local businessmen for them to petition the Duke to have him "promoted out" to some far-off region in France. But he refused to go and remained in Moedlich until he died, whereupon he requested to be buried in the local church with his farmer friends (who needed the dikes to make their fields cultivatable, I presume). Curiously, although the church is brick, the bell tower where the old Admiral is buried is made of wood, which is a very odd contrast. He reminded me of my great-great Uncle Admiral Holmes, though, in staying faithful to his self-perceived duty to the end.

Once past Lenzen, however, we were just alone on the dike between the Elbe and the farmland inland, for many kilometers. In one spot that had maybe 3 houses huddled together, we found a small memorial to the East Germans who had been killed at the Elbe border while trying to flee to West Germany. It was a stone with the years 1961 - 1989 on it, representing the beginning of the fortification of the border and the end of the partition of Germany, and a small propeller. I hope the Germans do not forget the deadly partitioning of Germany between East and West, because the struggle with a nascent Russia will no doubt continue into the future and I want Germany on our side!

We finally turned off the dike path at Cumlosen and headed directly toward Wittenberge where we had reserved a room for the night. As I had hoped and as our Komoot software had predicted, we had mostly cycleways alongside the highway that were both quite pretty and a whole lot safer than riding right on the highway directly with the cars and trucks!

We paused at a small shopping center on the western edge of Wittenberge, where I bought another bike light set plus food for our evening snack at Aldi, and then we ate a belated lunch at the cafeteria adjacent to the Edeka store to rest and warm up a bit.

Unfortunately, when we came out to resume our journey into Wittenberge, it had started to rain heavily, which is definitely unpleasant on bicycles. But we were close to town, so we very carefully worked our way down to the center of Wittenberge and a little further to the Hotel Alte Oelmuehle, (English: Hotel "Old Oil Mill"---I presume the mill pressed seeds to produce vegetable oil), located right on the harbor adjoining the Elbe River. The hotel had a very nice locked bicycle storage area about the size of a 2-car garage, and I was so wet and cold that I was just happy to shove the bicycles inside, lock them up, and retire to our room for the evening.