Advertisement
Photos from the previous blog are now up too!
Well I've now arrived in Lubeck, a beautiful city indeed (thanks lonely planet) on a warm and sunny and yes windy day! The wind if anything is getting stronger, and today I had a gentle (?!) 30 miler in the morning to get here. Actually most of the way was a very nice ride following the route of an old railway line through gently undulating countryside (note even gently undulating is tough on a fully loaded tourer) with deer and rabbits frolicking in the grass either side and huge wheat fields everywhere, and almost as huge farmhouses at all the villages on the way.
Well it may sound like everything has gone completely smoothly since yesterday, but not quite! Firstly having left Gluckstadt with the ambition to get as close to Lubeck as possible, I was finding progress tough into the wind and stopped for pommes (frites) at a village. After that suddenly it seemed like I'd got a whole new burst of energy, and dare I say it the wind had all of a sudden turned into a tail wind. I was flying along and into the town of
Bad Bramstedt. Unfortunately when I got there, some strange things started to happen, like I saw a sign saying Bad Bramstedt 24km and all the other signs just didn't seem right. It took a while to work out that I was actually in Barmstedt not Bramstedt. Oh how cruel that one interposition of letters could lead to two actual towns within 30km of each other. So in fact the wind hadn't changed direction at all. I had.
Well I lost heart for a while then, since the last hour I'd unintentionally been making no progress towards Lubeck. I pushed on and in some ways luck may have been with me, because cycling on till 9pm I found a cycle path cutting through fields, a perfect place to pull camp. I was kicking myself I hadn't had the forethought to buy a birthday beer from the preceeding service station (I'd gone in for water - why do they always fill your water bottles up half full with lukewarm water!!!!) as a quick look around the closest town of Wakendorf II revealed nothing more than a tractor shop and a series of quite the largest farmhouses I've ever seen. It was
also at that moment that I noticed that spoke number two of the trip had gone. And of course it was in the back wheel behind the gears, so would need a bike shop to repair again (I#ve had some luck though this time I got it done for 5 euros here in Lubeck). Am i really travelling so heavy, or have I just been unlucky with a substandard set of spokes?! It's fair to say that I've been doing a lot of off roading, and quite a few very bumpy cycle lanes. maybe in norway it'll be easier as I'll be on roads mainly?!
So I headed back to put the tent up and made up some pasta and ate the remains of a cabano - what a celebration for my birthday. I was lucky enough to see lots of deer very close up, and also lucky not to see some angry farmer in the morning, or a field full of cows outside my tent.
Anyway, I've got a very cheap and nice room in a hostel here, so I'm almost tempted to take another rest day as it's as nice a place as you could hope
for - with canals and old germanic architecture and bakeries full of apple strudel and the like. We'll see how I feel tomorrow. If I head on I'll be heading northwards hopefully to catch a ferry from Puttgarden (about 100km from Lubeck) to Denmark.
Stats
-------
Day 8 - Bad Bederkesa to Wakendorf II - 27/5
Dist (miles): 76.12
Ave speed (mph): 11.5
Max speed (mph): 18.6
Time on saddle: 6h35
Day 9 - Wakendorf II to Lubeck - 28/5
Dist (miles): 28.47
Ave speed (mph): 10.9
Max speed (mph): 20.0
Time on saddle: 2h36
Advertisement
Tot: 0.077s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 13; qc: 28; dbt: 0.0454s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.1mb
Jean Luc
non-member comment
Keep up the good work, the stats are looking impressive.