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August 28 Monday Bicycle touring Germany We had just arisen at about 8 AM from our bus shelter camp out and had put the eggs on to fry while sitting on our camprests bicycle touring mats inside the bus shelter, when the first kids arrived. The kids did a double-take, and then a triple-take when they saw us in their bus shelter. I'm sure the first kid must have thought he was still dreaming because he kept coming back over and over to look in. I hadn't thought that this was a school bus stop, too. Soon, fifteen kids were milling about the bus shelter's entrance, but the closest any came was one girl who set her school bag just inside the door. Sharon said lucky for them it had quit raining. Guess we bicycle tourists are pretty scary looking. Then again, we haven't had a shower in a while. After breakfast, we cycled out of town to the west. The south route had a road closed sign and we figured a bridge must be out. We were bicycling a one-lane track that had a strip of pavement where each car tire would fit. The centre portion is nothing but a strip of grass. Found a large grocery store, Komm (for calm shoppers?), unlike the Scandinavian stores named Konsum. We entered and discovered they had English songs playing in the background. Why do they do that? We don't have German songs playing in the background at grocery stores back home in Canada or America. Americanism has spread far and wide. Lots of people are walking around with American logos on T shirts. Have they all been to America? We snigger to ourselves, imaging the day that Americans would be walking around a shopping centre wearing T-shirts with the words "Proud to be German" emblazoned across their chests. Bought a bunch of food. We sat on a curb at the back of the grocery store parking lot and had a snack to tide us over until our lunch stop. After our snack, I walked to the store's rubbish bin at the back of the store to put our garbage in. When I opened the Dumpster's lid I found loads of yogurt and chocolate puddings that had been thrown out because they have the previous day's 'consume by' date stamped on them. I grabbed a package of a dozen yogurt and half a dozen puddings. We ate our treasures with big smiles on our faces. As Arran said, "And the Lord said, 'Let there be binning' and there was much happiness throughout the land." The land is mainly flat we found as we returned to our German bicycle tour. Lots of round bales in the fields. Lots of pine forest. The roads we are cycling in this part of Germany are sometimes brand new smooth; other roads are bumpy, but they look smooth; and other roads we are bicycling are totally terrible with narrow two foot widths of concrete strips laid together with a space every few feet that makes riding railroad ties look downright pleasant by comparison. Some towns we cycle into have cobble streets. We even bicycled a road made from large rocks that were particularly jolting. It would have been almost as fast to push our bikes ... but a lot less challenging. We bicycled to a lake by Jobel, Germany, looking for a free bicycle touring camp spot, but we couldn't find anything near the water. Arran, putting the German he learned in school in New Zealand to good use, asked a woman at a farm house with large and loud barking dogs if we could camp. She said we could camp up the road in the forest. The road we cycled to the forest was loose sand. Not so great on a loaded touring bicycle. |
