Leaving our second home in Naarden we took a short cycle back to the hotel where we’d recently spent our anniversary at Amersfoort, successfully missing the thunderstorms until we could actually see the hotel across the road and getting drenched in the 300m before we could get to it.
The rain now is tropical not just showers, great deluges for 15 minutes then gone. Who needs Thailand, but on the bright side we were offered a free glass of bubbly on arrival – should have been cocoa – and postponed that until we had got changed and dry and sat by the fire to enjoy it.
The next day took us through some beautiful cycling in forests and heaths. It’s hard to believe that NL is so densely populated as we hardly saw a soul all day and at times you couldn’t see any sign of civilisation other than the cycle path. It was gorgeous, if wet and we clocked up the Double Devils Distance of 66,666.6km on Tilly….of course we then had our 2nd puncture shortly after the double devils number. Same wheel… 🤔
That number also struck with avengeance the next day with plenty of rain and us pulling coats on and off all day. On one of these I somehow managed to get my watch caught as I took my coat off and it must have fallen to the ground. I didn’t notice and off we went.
Another 30km further on and I noticed my watch was missing and we then debated whether to cycle back or not to look for it and decided not to and stop in somewhere the next day to buy a new one… We carried on and a little while later got an email from a lady (Julia) whose Dad had found my watch in the street outside her shop and said we could collect it from there..in a town we’d not been to and had no idea how it had got there. Amazing!
So the next day we had a short ride from our cozy overnight cabin into Zwolle, got the train to Julias small town and collected my watch, taking a very grateful bunch of flowers for her, had lunch there and then back to Zwolle to collect my prescription meds which I’d also forgotten to pack! This senior stuff is such fun!
But the rides here are gorgeous, the coffee stops fabulous and the camping…. Errr maybe we’ll get to that later in the trip, only it’s wet and we are camping wimps so its hotels instead for us at the moment.
It’s odd, when you’re young you camp because it’s cheap and you dream of a few nights in a nice hotel and when you’re older you hotel and fantasise about a few nights in a tent…
We crossed the border into Germany and it was a real culture shock. The border towns were ghastly, people seemed sullen and almost rude and the place stinks of smoke! We’d forgotten how much people smoke here. But our hotel was great and we found a restaurant that did vegetarian schnitzels in a black pepper sauce – really great crap food!
Winding our way north through the daily monsoons it was lovely cycling – flat with enough bakery’s to keep us in cakes and rolls and we hit the coast west of Bremmerhaven. Just to add to the rain there’s been some tremendous winds,which have at least meant that the rain came and went quickly and when it was behind you it was like having an ebike, when against you you wished you had an ebike!
Bremmerhaven is a modern town with much of it destroyed in the war and replaced by a mixture of ghastly buildings and more recently some quite funky stuff. It has a lovely dock area and we were fortunate enough to get a last minute room overlooking the inner harbour with huge french windows to gaze out of.
Leaving Bremmerhaven the wind and rain conspired against us making the hop up to Cuxhaven a bit of a slog and a wet slog at that! Have I mentioned the rain? Even our Goretex waterproofs said WTF and we were very grateful for, and made good use of many of the shelters on route.
Cuxhaven has a lovely promenade and beach front – which you have to pay to enter – and is full of quaint basket double seats in various colours, we really liked it and it’s a very popular German resort at the Aldeburgh end of the market rather than Blackpool!
From here there used to be a ferry across to Brunsbuttel but this went bust a few years ago and a new one is taking forever to get going. There is however a catamaran service for foot passengers which takes bikes. But it’s cheaper and easier to fly to America than get this, bags have to be checked in hours before the sailing and the bike has to be left with them for loading. They charge per bag, extra for bikes etc and it only runs in the evening, which meant waiting a whole day for a ferry then arriving at the only available exceptionally expensive hotel the other side late in the evening, which we weren’t keen on, so we cycled further round the coast to get the cheap ferry 80km away!
The cycle routes are certainly not up to Dutch standards – though are brilliant compared to the UK – and one of the paths had loads of lose tarmac filling on a concrete single lane track. I weaved from one side of the track to the other to avoid yet another tarmac section and I continued on my own as Tilly’s front wheel sank into a huge crack camouflaged by grass. I flew through the air, straight through the brambles did a double sommersault straight into the dyke and the watching ducks marked me 7.1 commenting that hats should be removed before diving…. all whilst Linda and Tilly crashed to the ground.
I was stuck in the middle up to my waist in water and Linda, very fortunately, was almost completely unscathed. Once Linda had extracted herself from under Tilly and our panniers she had to come and haul me out of the mud and back on to dry land.
I was covered in those sticky ball seeds and soaking wet so did a complete strip down on the path (rudey nudey) and dried myself off and put clean dry clothes on. In late July you’d think that would be refreshing but it was cold and windy and the one time you could do with a monsoon to shower in, it was dry.
I’d cut my leg in various places with the brambles and Linda insisted, quite rightly, on spraying it with our alcohol spray. Boy that stung!. We were both lucky to not suffer any injuries so plodded on, a bit more cautiously with less weaving!
Everyday we’ve thought that it’s been the wettest yet and every day gets worse. We hole up in various bus shelters and cycle refuges (and sometimes still have to wear our rain gear to stay dry) to avoid the worst of it and even managed to get invited inside at a lovely cafe for lunch as it was tipping down and the cafe only had outside seating. The owner felt that sorry for us, we sat in her front room and had some wonderful homemade soup and cheesecake, well you have to don’t you!
Arriving at the ferry, the queue was miles long – according to the signs at least 1 hour wait, but obviously for cyclists we just glided past to the front of the queue and got on board about 30 seconds after arriving.
The next day we arrived at Brunsbuttel and the locks at the southern end of the Kiel canal after a horrible wet cycle into the wind, if it gets much stronger we may as well turn round and roll to Italy! But our hotel was a posh affair and we arrived early enough to enjoy the luxury.
But in true German fashion (is that an oxymoron?) the 5 star hotel was having a heavy metal evening in it’s really posh bar and restaurant. We stopped for a quick drink and then left before our ears started to bleed, to a lovely quiet Italian restaurant around the corner.
Moving on the next day, the weather continued to deliver on Climate Change and we began our cycle of the Kiel Canal. It’s got a service road either side in most places which consists of two concrete strips the width of a paving slab. For lots of this that’s great, but for some of the areas away from the towns it’s quite overgrown with grass covering much of the slabs and making cycling quite difficult as each side of the slabs there is often a large drop. We didn’t want to end up in another canal!
We managed to hide from rain in various places and our 2nd day on the canal brought us 1 broken down ferry, 5 diversions, 2 lifts and one tunnel and of course, puncture no 3 just as we’d finished waiting for 90 minutes for the monsoon to stop. Same wheel.
When we get a puncture I check the tyre for any cuts or spikes thoroughly and each time we’ve found none. I check the rim too and again this looks fine, so the first 2 punctures we put down to possible cheap tubes from Asia, but the 3rd was on a Schwalbe tube, the Rolls Royce of tubes. So again, more checks, no evidence of anything wrong. So I changed the tyre too as the rim of the tyre has some sharpish rubber on it, which is very odd. It actually gives you a nasty scratch when you rub your finger across it. Perhaps this is the problem? We’ll see.
We eventually rolled into Kiel after our anticipated 4 hour cycle took 8 hours and found a bar right at the end of the canal for a celebratory drink.
Overall, we did enjoy our cycle along the canal and it was interesting to see all the huge ships navigating their way through it, but it was hard work, a bit rough in places and we’d had biblical rain to deal with so wouldn’t recommend it, but the beer was very nice!
Kiel was devasted in the war and rebuilt in a mish mash of concrete styles and it’s not that nice. The waterfront is fun to walk down and the town hall area which survived is nice, but the rest isn’t worth a visit – so we decided to have 3 nights there!!
We’d cycled non stop for 13 days from Naarden and whilst we felt fine, thought our legs deserved a rest and with the weather forecast giving us even more rain thought sod it. As it was, this was a good call as the next day it rained all day non stop, but more normal rain than biblical stuff. So we lounged about, ate cake and caught up with jobs.
We had planned to head south again from here but decided to let the train take the strain and whisk us on to Hamburg so we can continue our tour down a hopefully better cycle path along the River Elbe.
Naturally German trains take Tandems. Or do they? Well yes, said the info, no said the ticket desk and both said Crapchat. It appears that Deutches Bahnhoff allow tandems on regional trains, but allow each county to make their own rules. So whilst Schwesig Holstein allow tandems Hamburg doesn’t. So you have to get off the train 30km outside the city.
But as the devils number was still playing havoc with us, a tree fell on the line so we couldn’t go anyway that day. But they did clear it the next day and we thought we’d just wing it and buy tickets for Hamburg and let them kick us off. When the guard came along, he looked at our tickets and Tilly and simply stamped the tickets and moved on. Result.
But the devils number wasn’t having any of that malarkey so had the train breakdown and get diverted to a different station on the wrong side of Hamburg to where we wanted to be.
Still, at least that meant we had a cycle through the city and really liked the old centre that somehow survived the firestrom that obliterated much of the city in WW2..
We also felt hopeful that with blue skies appearing, there might be a change in the weather coming….
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