|
August 30 Wednesday sun cloud chilly 15º C Bicycle touring Germany Checked out a small outdoor market. Two guys with ponies will pull you around town, a couple of vegetable and fruit stands, sausage, grilled chicken, mainly American logo clothes with sweats reading 'Miami Beach.' We cycled away from the market and settled on a bakery next to the market. I bought a slice of Black Forest cake and another creamy concoction. Germans know how to make yummy sweets. Germany is a great place for bicycle tourists! Even the smallest towns we have bicycled through have at least one bakery. In larger places we often cycle past three separate bakeries. Gee whiz, I've eaten so much sugar already on our Germany bicycle tour I should have diabetes. Found good chocolate bars, too. They sport a creamy filling like Caramilk caramel, but instead of ordinary caramel these babies have exotic fillings of kiwi and passion fruit, banana, mango and guava. "Worthiness," as Arran says. On our German bicycle tour route today we followed another sandy road. Then we found some smooth asphalt. Much nicer to ride bikes on. Then came a major bumpy road. Just when we thought the bicycle touring surface couldn't get any worse, we hit cobbles. Oh, my aching bum. According to the map we are using for our bicycle tour, we are supposed to be cycling through an area covered in lakes. But it is a cruel cartographer's joke ... we haven't seen hardly any lakes from the roads we are cycling along. Near the end of our bicycling day, the rear braze-on on Arran's touring bike snapped off. And two of his spokes are loose. Then his rear tire flats. Hoo boy. Time to stop for some pizza. But then Arran and Bec's stove won't work. Finally, after considerable coaxing, it comes to life. "Ah well," Arran says after his harsh bicycle touring day, "off to bed for a restful night's sleep after bouncing along all day over cobbles." But what's this? His camp rest has sprung an internal (!) leak where he had patched after laying his camp rest on a thorn in an olive grove while they were on their bicycle tour in Greece. The mat is bulging up into a huge pillow. That would be great, but it is in the wrong spot and it bucks him off. "This is stupid," we hear him say through their tent wall. After a couple more unsuccessful attempts to riding the bucking camp rest, he deflates the mattress and lays on the material like a balloon out of air. "Stay tuned for further developments," he informs us. We are camped in a forest less than 20 kilometres from Berlin. |
