May 23, 2014

Today is our first full day in Germany, a country we have never visited before. So what are our impressions? Well, the weather is not doing it justice as we have black clouds and drizzle giving everywhere a gloomy feel.  The landscape we are travelling through at the moment is still ‘big sky’ country very much like Holland – flat, but perhaps a bit more wooded and with less waterways, lakes and canals. The cycle tracks are more varied with lots of twists and turns and different surfaces; smooth tarmac (not that often), block paving (very often), bumpy tarmac (very often) through to gravel and mud. The way-finding is more of a challenge; you need to closely follow the map all the time and use your initiative, whereas in Holland there was no need for a map at all because of the extensive sign-posting. Having said that, we haven’t had any problems and, almost invariably, if we look at all unsure of where to go someone stops and offers to help. Neither have there been the frustrations of closed cycle paths and diversions. My crash course in German is coming in handy, not that I can say anything that anyone understands, but at least I do catch a few words of what is being said to me.

The drizzle continues all morning and gets worse by mid-afternoon when it turns torrential.  We manage not to get saturated by sheltering under some leafy trees.  After half-an-hour or so, very unexpectedly, the clouds break and the sun suddenly comes out – the whole landscape lights up and the gloom is banished.  The cycle track starts to steam ahead of us as the sun dries the wet surface.

We’re really enjoying the cycling, we can see the river most of the time, with numerous barges and cruisers chugging along in both directions.  The barges carry an incredible variety of cargo, coal, sand, steel, cars, tractors, lorries, gas, in huge amounts – one barge goes by with dozens of new tractors lined up along the deck.  At other times we’re cycling through wooded lanes or fields.  By the end of the day we’re approaching the more industrial region with kilometre after kilometre of factories and warehouses – not quite so scenic.  Tomorrow we’ll be in the industrial heartland with three big cities to find our way through – Düsseldorf, Koln and Bonn.

Although we really want to cover about 100 kilometres per day we are finding that our pace is slow because of the rough cycle track surfaces.  It is also difficult to find camping at the exact point you want to stop at.  We call it a day just before 7pm when we arrive at a camp-site just outside Düsseldorf.  It is a little quirky – it takes Ken about twenty minutes to find the toilets – he should have known that it was the door with the metre high plastic light-up teddy above it!