Bouncing to Berlin

Hello everyone!

I am now in Berlin close to where the wall was. I last wrote from Lubeck which was right on the border in the West Germany. Since then Ken and I have mostly been on the Copenhagen to Berlin cycle route. It is 400 miles long and that’s me by the sign board near Krakow am See. It is lovely undulating country all formed by ice depositing rock eroded from Norway and Sweden in the ice ages. Here endeth the geography lesson, but most of what follows is about much futile history of the 20^th century.

Lubek was heavily bombed and its massive St Nicolas cathedral bears witness to this with the huge bell still lying where it fell in 1944, that’s it burning in the photograph with the bell below.

We knew we had got into the east when we saw our first cobbled streets (hence the bouncing to Berlin) through villages and the Trabant convertible – what would a young East German have given for one 30 years ago! Our route took us to Wismar, which was as prosperous as Lubeck in the Hanseatic League. It became a Swedish city for 200 years and so has lots of houses like that in the picture. Being on the Baltic, I also had to take a paddle on what was the last sunny day for a week, with lots of cold wet stuff following.

But the scenery going south from Wismar has made up for the weather. Mostly through small villages in lovely farming country, the route has passed many lakes, most of them in a series of nature parks, (as in the sign board) and some splendid local churches mostly made of massive boulders topped with brick or half timbered.

We have stayed in one hotel; in Wismar, it was right out of the old east with lots of kitsch, such as the revolving mirror ball to eat breakfast by; and German youth hostels. These have been great, apart from the last two before Berlin. The first was in Furstenberg and the second in Oranienberg. Innocuous names until you get there and see the full names of the hostels, Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen respectively. We found it very unsettling, especially the first where we were staying in one of the eight female warders’ blocks. At the last we were in the house built for Heinrich Eich, who with Himmler was responsible for the whole of the concentration camp system. There were pictures of the Eich family Christmas 1942, with a tree with a Swastika and not a fairy on top which reminded me of the ‘Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’. It was a very creepy place to stay which we were glad to leave on Saturday to cycle into Berlin.

The camp area at Ravenbruck
Eich with Himmler
Eichs House, now the hostel.
The Hearth Room where the kids had their Christmas tree - see following, it is now the dining room

This is where I was sure Ken had got his GPS wrong and had landed us up in Shanghai!!

So, it is now late on Sunday and we leave in the morning to cycle to our last hostel in Germany before we go into Poland. That’s Ken in the picture as we entered the old West Berlin from East Germany before the Wall came down. Berlin has been fantastically interesting. For me seeing those historic places such as Checkpoint Charlie and bits of the actual Wall has been most moving, although one cannot fail to be impressed by the Brandenburg Gate, Tiergarten and Unter den Linden. It’s been Ken’s 65^th today so we celebrated with a meal at the top of the East Berlin TV Tower – it revolves, is the second tallest structure in Europe after the Moscow Tower and serves up a jolly good lamb stew! Next blog will be from Poland, so it’s anybody’s guess what we will be eating by then!

PS slight delay in publication until Tuesday as a result of computer problems. So now writing in Seelow on the Polish border. I thought I would add the below which I missed off the last blog.

PPS, hope the weather is better for you, at least the countries we are in have a government.

Love to all!!!

John

Lurching to Luebek

Greetings all! Now in Lubek with Ken Reed from Weymouth. It´s Labour Day here 1 May, so everything is closed and very peaceful. I have yet to find out about this city, so I´ll start with Amsterdam, which I do know a little about. That is where the picture above was taken. So glad to have had the cycle there - it is such a wonderfully planned city with a network of canals radiating and encircling the city, so unlike so many places where your bearings are buildings and roads, in typical Dutch fashion, your bearings here are water. Brown cafes (sorry, not more of Brown), wonderful Rijk´s Museum with the rembrandts and vermeers, and wonderfully friendly people. In fact it is such a friendly place that even the bed bugs at the Zeeburg Hostel seemed to take to me and seem to have remained ever since!

Leaving Amsterdam on a sunny but cool wind day was splendid as, with cycle you can be in the countryside in 20 mins. the pictures that follow show the wildlife again and the lovely canals to be found within 10 miles of the centre.

Also, I have passed a lot of reed cutting areas alongside the canals. The thatched roofs in Holland are mostly huge. Big barns with the farmhouse incorporated. In Germany I have found that they cover such houses in solar panels, whereas the Dutch seem to be sticking to thatch. The boat below was delivering reed and had just come through one of those small hand operated lifting bridges.

I was due to camp for three nights after Amsterdam, but decided that if the routes were good I would try to collapse the ride into two days and go extra fast. There followed lots of below sea level polder lands, much of it in Flevoland, which was created in the 1960s and has Llelystad as its principal town. You can see it in the distance in the next picture, with the Zuider Zee alongside. One visit confirmed that camping here would be uninspiring, so on for another 30 miles to a beautiful site in a forest. As I got closer, at last I saw the fabled tulip fields!

The following day was on to Emmen, which dad´s regiment helped free. I thought it would be rather lovely, but it was very new and I suspect had been much rebuilt after the war. So no photograph. But the following day, my last, sadly, in the netherlands was lovely and took me past a small town called Ter Apel. It looked boring, grid iron on the map, but on getting there was charming, with everything planned around a set of canals and with some very gracious 1900s houses. I got to talikng to a couple who owned one much like that in the picture below. They were old enough to recall the war and knew the poles had freed their town. Apparently, every 4 May they observe a minute´s silence in thanks for their freedom and on 5 May they celebrate the end of the war on that day in 1945.

So, I left Holland headed for Leer youth hostel. Thats it in the picture below with Mark the Frenchman who was cycling to the 'Nord Cap' of sweden before heading off to St Petersburg on his World Tour. His bike weighed a ton, not to mention the trailer. German Hostels are massive and mostly empty at this time. There were only 3 of us staying with a personal room each. The effort to save a day and not camp was worthwhile as it gave me a day to get to know Leer, which is charming and has it's own ship museum - see below. While there though I ruminated on why I liked Holland so much, yet had never visited before. A few reasons:-

• Roads with no potholes - some of the German roads are even worse than ours. Cycle paths too which are smooth and go anywhere you could want to go
• Bakerij - for the daily supply of luscious cakes that all cyclists need to go fast and far
• water, water everwhere, and so well used and maintained, if you see what I mean
• a gentility about all the people I met. seeing folks of all ages going around on their sit up and beg bikes took me back to my 1950s childhood where all my friends' parents and mine used their cycles, going to the shops, delivering kids to school etc. Somehow life seemed slower and more relaxed, the way it used to be when I was young. I'll not pontificate now about the return to cycling that we could do with in Britain, fuel prices will get us back there in due course!
  
  

Now, I have to say that the first thing that happened to me in Germany was to be given a free beer at a restaurant on the border. Since then Germany too has been a delight, apart from the motorist who stopped me and told me that I had by law to use the cycle way supplied, even though it had a dreadful surface and I was trying to do over 80 miles that day and had already had a flat tyre. We agreed that I'd wait until the Police stopped me before I got off the road. I had to complete 82 miles that day largely because I was heading for a lovely hostel in the middle of a forest yet had mistakenly thought I could take a tunnel below the River Weser (of Pied Piper fame), but found only cars and lorries could use it. So I had to divert 25 miles in all to get across by ferry. There are two ferry photographs (very boring) but they show how you have to be careful here to check how to get places by cycle - the second is crossing the River Elbe.

That took me to Gluckstad on the Elbe, below, which has a pretty harbour frontage and its own ship museum, with one ship - this one built south of Hull for use on the Wash and along the east coast of UK

Finally yesterday I did the last 65 miles to Lubeck to meet Ken. It's an impressive city on a river island giving onto the Baltic Sea, where Ken and I head tomorrow. The weather has been more changeable of late, but the change of wind direction from NE to SW has been wonderful and has made me realise how tough the first 2 or 3 weeks were. I had trouble cycling more than 10mph on the flat often in Holland, yet yesterday I managed almost twice that speed for most of the day with the wind behind me.

So, the first part of my Pilgrimage is now done, with my arrival in Wilhelmshaven where dad ended the war on Tuesday. But it wasn't the most picturesque of places so no photograph. Now it's on to Dad's birthplace via the Baltic, Berlin, Poznan and Warsaw.

Distance so far is 1270 miles when I reckoned on only 1050 to get me here. Partly that's my mistakes en route, but a lot is down to cycle path as opposed to road distances. But Ken has his trusty GPS with all the routes loaded onto it, so from nowe on I can sit back and relax!!!

All the best to you all!! Have a good pre-election week and may the best bigot win!

John

P. S. sorry about the alliterative titles, it's only done to annoy Mark who says they are cheesey!

Ambling to Amsterdam

Hi all you blog watchers!

First whole day in Amsterdam, the global village, today. What a wonderful place for cycling the Netherlands is, it even beats Belgium, which is saying something. Although battling 25mph wind most of yesterday, cycling these wonderful cycleways still seemed like gliding along on a bike travelator compared to some of the roads I have been on, especially UK with all our potholes. Yesterday was als remarkable because as I approached Schipol airport I heard the first aircraft in days, presumably as the flight ban was starting to lift. Before that mostly I had been listening to the amazing variety of birdlife there is here given the mass of waterways all of which provide a wonderful habitat for geese, many varieties of duck, moorhens, swans nesting on eggs, kingfishers and herons.

Talking of waterways, I note that nobody has contaced me about the deliberate mistake in my last blog - I crossed the Seine at Vernon, not the Rhone. But I think I have crossed the Rhine - it's not dalled that as it gets to the sea, with its waterways turning into Rivers such as the Maas, which I crossed a couple of days ago. That brings me to the main experience of the last few days - visiting Breda and the area to the north of the city.

My dad always said he had visited Breda, but he never told me about the events. In the pictures attached you'll see the Polish cemetery which I found as I cycled in. There around 100 of dad's comrades are buried along with another 50 paratroopers involved in the Arnhem operation. I was surprised when I looked at the monument to find that there were lots of fresh flowers, then I discovered the small paingin amongst them saying "Katyn 1940 - 2010". The Poles have been through a lot as a nation.

I camped in Breda and when I got back to the tent and elderly couple (75 and 83) invited me into their caravan for a late evening coffee (I think they took pity on me). It truned out that they were from Emmen, which I'll be visiting next week. It also was freed by the Dad's regiment, and being aged 10 and 18 at the time they remembered it well, having endured "the winter of hunger" in 1944-45 and having to wait until almost the end of the war to be freed from Nazi rule. It was very touching as they told me how many Dutch towns and villages have memories of and revere the Poles and the armies of other nations for what they did.

Other events? Well, not having learnt my lesson last time, on the very day I completed the last blog, I left Gent at lunchtime in a real hurry determined to cycle 90km to Antwerp along the River Schelde. First I managed to ride 5km along the Leis, then having negotiated miles of ting road I cycled 15km along the Schelde in the wrong direction. By the time I had aborted that idea and found my way through the badly sin\gned suburbs of Gent it was 4.30 and I had 65 km to do to Antwerp. But I made it by 8.00 and the hostel by 8.30pm. But it was bread and cheese for me that night as all the restaurants were too far away - I am learning graduallt\y abut cycle navigation and wish I had brought a compass!

As for places visited (see pictures):-

• Antwerp was civilised - I passed through a huge Jewish quarter and massive port area


• The border into Holland merited a picture for its insignificance


• Bergen op Zoom was a very pleasant rest place with a lovely Grot Market square


• Breda is a very hip place now, with waterfront bars and a wonderful cathedral tower


• Gouda isn't just about cheese, it's very charming in a Cambridgey sort of way and it too has a lovely cathedral with water surrounding


• Until you've been in Holland you don't really understand how much water there is here and what the Dutch (a lovely bunch of folk from those I have met) have done to create their country. Windmills new and old, lovely residential areas all with their own waterways surrounding ultra neat houses and gardens, and polders with high rivers on one side of dams and low fields on the other. Beautiful

Finally, cycling along one muses. Everywhere I have been apart from the ride in England I have seen wind farms. I know that they are not the most efficient and that their energy is not always delivered at the right time, but why do we bury our heads where the French (even the French), Belgians and Dutch know that continually to use up the Earth's capital in the form of fossil fuel without using it to create means to harness the energy of the sun, wind , sea etc. is foolhardy. Why isn't there a wind farm on Portland!!??

Here endeth the lesson for today! Now signing off. Next posting probably from Lubeck on the Baltic close to the old East-West German border.

John

PS - very glad to be away from the election personality politics stuff. Ken, who joins me in Germany tells me that it's getting to be neck and neck between all three parties. Michael Foot and Maggie may have had their separate drawbacks, but at least they had some political philosophy on which one could vote.

Gently cycling to gent

Two weeks gone now and 600 moiles not counting the extras around town etc.. The wind persists from the NE as Ihead that way, but its not raining. Apologies for punctuation, I have trouble coping with a non UK keyboard.

Now I am on the flat bit the days are easier and ,ake me realise how tough some days have been. Rest days as in Vernon are a good thing in some ways, but last Thursday as I set off from Vernon out of the Rhone Valley going North with a 25 mph wind against me I really felt like a snail towing its shell. Lyon La Foret is a lovely village well worth going to and all along the way, as here I am looko,g for church towers to tell me where settlements are. The day ended with 60 miles covered by 7.30pm which is when the front pannier frame fell off. Luckily I had a great place to stay and was only 2 miles away, the distance Patrick drove to pick me up.

Have just added the pictures, sorry that they are in no order, but the house is where I stayed that night. Following that I crossed the lower Somme not far from where Dad did in September 1944. After that I passes through Hesdin where he hjad been and then hqd my first camping session. A very cold start, but I soon warmed up ctcling up hill for about 17 miles going past the straw horse en route.

Then I got onto the high plateaux passing Crecy well known for where Ed III thrashed the French. After that it was donhill towards Flanders and a night in an F1 at St Omer. Going east from there took me to the First World War battlefields, crossing the Messine Ridge; You cane see why that area became a main front as the armies fought for the only high land in a very flat landscape, especially as you go further east towards Kortrijk the flax centre.

Yesterday I cycled from there to Gent, see night scene, expecting to do 35 miles. I did 55 having not noticed the canal to Roulers while listening intently to the I pod. But Dad went through Roulers and I said I would follow his route, so I think he played a hand in Yesterdays blunder.

So today its a (( miler along the Scheldt River to Antwerp. As you ride you get to muse on the things that have gone well and not so well. After two weeks the wells are

• Mark cycling back down a 2 mile steep hill to get the pizzas when I was too knackered on the first day
• Patricks lift
• The chemist who printed a google map for me to get to a Hostel
• Finding a contact lense after it blew onto a field
• The tail wind to Trun aznd the Mpnt Ormel Museum
• Hilde in a bar in Gent who introduced me to Orvel beer.

So thats it for now, next write up probably from Amsterdam

Love to all

John

Mixing with Monet

Away a week now. Covered 300 miles in five and a half days with one flat tyre and a rattley pannier rack, so cannot complain. Best part is the weather which has now warmed wonderfully. Leaving UK was pretty wetas Mark and I met in Portsmouth in the middle of a huge storm at 7.00pm after each having a demanding ride of about 60 miles (although his took only a third the time mine took, but mine was demanding because of the problems in finding the Solent way along a very muddy and wet shoreline and having to negotiate through the architectural bliss of Gosport.

Once here we had a splendid day together with early morning market in Caen, then ride to the Polish cemetery near Falaise, followes by a wonderful tail wind thqat took us to Trun and then south to the Museum that tells the story of the Battle of the "Fally Gap" that my father's regiment fought starting on his birthday, 17 August 1944, ending on 20 August when the gap was closed and thousands of Germans were locked in. The scenes depicted were truly horrific and qa blight on such a beautiful landscape, which forms the escarpment at the edge of the Isle de France plateau.

The following two days were spent cycling across the wonderful orchards and then arable lands towards Paris with wonderful quiet roads and a lot of father and son chatter as we wended our way. Mark likes to average 30kph plus while I manage 20kph only. So he helped me and I did my best. We had great accommodation, but managed to enter no bars in th three days - what does that say?

Today has been a day off. I am at the youth hostel in Vernon, which is fine, although lqte lqst night when I thought I had the room to myself a guy of about 65 arrived. He can best be likened to Estragon frm waiiting for Godot. He told me he lived in Paris in a cave since 1964, which seemed in character until I realised the true meaning of cave. Apparently he was booted out of his cellar in 2009 and has been living in youth hostels ever since, poor chap as I am sure he has a bad heart complaint.

So today the sun shone and I spent the day in checking the bike over and then riding it to Monet's garden and the impressionist museum at Giverny. Tomorrow it's north towards the coast to seek out the fabled Cafe Eu.

Love to all.

John