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Tick Remover In the morning, Kay ran to catch the bus to school in Chemnitz. "Break a leg," he said with a grin, as he rushed out the door. Sharon and I ate breakfast with Anja--dark rye bread, rye crackers, two kinds of cheese, one brie, and the other similar to gouda, a selection of jams, chocolate spread, black tea. After a quick shower we were ready to hit the road. I borrowed Kay's German Cyclist Hospitality guide filled with three-thousand addresses. I gave my stuffed elephant I had found in Norway to baby Louisa. Anja conjectured she couldn't gallivant off on a world tour because she other responsibilities. A low lying fog cover, misted the entire valley along the river. I learned wet cobbles were extremely slippery. As I turned off the main road onto a side country road, my front tire skidded sideways and I almost lost the whole shebang. Traffic was busy. We had traveled these roads twice with Kay in the car. People we passed were friendly. They waved and voiced a quiet, "Tag."I noticed an old man at his mail box, holding a fistful of divergent-colored gladiolas. I rushed over and asked if I could take his picture. "Nein. Nein," he whimpered emphatically and tried to quickly unlock the front door to vanish back inside his house. In the small town of Dorf Chemnitz, Sharon and I ate the lunch Anja had packed for us. Dainty meat sandwiches, two boiled eggs and an apple each. The circular rose garden supplied benches facing traffic. We turned our bench around so we could view the creek instead. At the Komm grocery store in Zwonitz, I bought two horns like Arran and Rebecca had, with rubber bulbs on the end. They must have been a bad influence on us. A cyclist we met at the store speculated he couldn't go on a long tour because he was only by himself. There was always a reason not to go. Albeit, some better than others. Lossnitz and Aue were large towns--jammed with traffic as we hit them at rush hour. We hurried to make it out of the busy streets, then stopped at a forest road beside the river by Albunau. Around the forestry gate, we followed a dirt road. Near a creek, we set up in a secluded spot. In the morning, walkers passing by our tent cheerily waved, "Gut Morn." They were out picking mushrooms. I found a tick crawling on me, but not embedded yet. Too bad, I wanted to see if our new tick-removal tool worked. The tick was super tiny. A mere black speck with legs. Sharon wasn't in a riding mood, but the sun was shining and we were right out in the open to anyone walking or driving along. Not that we were on a busy thoroughfare, but wild camping was against the law in Germany. We cycled until we came to a roadside rest area and stopped to have lunch under the covered table. It started to rain. A car pulled into the rest area. An old woman hopped out of the passenger side. She wandered over to a log pile, hiding her from the traffic on the road, but right out in the open to us. She mustn't have seen us sitting at the picnic table, hidden behind the spruce trees. She hiked up her dress. She dropped her hose and peed. That was the trouble when oldster's eyesight failed. In the afternoon, Sharon went for a walk and found a lean-to machine shed, at the bottom of the ski jump. In the pitch black, through a tunnel of trees, we pushed our bikes there. When we arrived at the lean-to, a light came from the window of the house. In the jet black night, we stumbled back through the forest and down the rocky road. After searching for an illusive flat spot we camped behind the picnic table on lumpy ground. Sharon used my Bic lighter as a mini torch, and in the process melted the plastic into an unusable molten blob, never to light again. The next two days were cold, gray and miserable. It rained non-stop. We sat at the picnic table, under the protective roof, sheltered by the surrounding evergreen trees, reading and talking. Water drops clung to the tree needles like shimmering pearl drops. Before it was totally black, like last night, we pushed farther up the slope into the forest and found a flat spot. Sharon found a tick embedded in her shoulder. I searched out the tick-removal tool and clamped it on the little bugger. After three turns the tick was quickly and painlessly out. What an amazing tool. It sure beat chiseling the tick's head out with a needle for fifteen painful minutes. |
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