Gross Nord See, Germany: Hills, hills!

August 11, 2015

WELL, fancy that! It's been so long since I'd been up a decent hill that I wondered if I could still climb one. The last was back in Scotland, and how long ago was that?

Those hills came as a surprise. So did the ease of getting out of Hamburg. I'd expected to be lost in a ganglion of arteries and heavy traffic and irritable drivers. But, no.

There was traffic, of course. But German drivers are among the world's most courteous and certainly the most law-abiding. If there's a 50 sign, they've dropped their speed to 50 by the time they reach it. Anywhere else, it's only at the sign that they even think about braking.

And so, after an hour and a half decorated with roadworks, I was out of the city with neither bruise nor bloodshed. All that was left was the hinterland of rich people's houses where the daily conversation must turn on horses. Every house had a burglar alarm and every house, it seemed, had a horse box.

I'm not struck on German as a language and I'm irrationally crotchety about that ß letter. What sort of language needs an ß when, so far as I can see, the letter s would do it more easily? And don't get me started about words starting pf. How can you say pf?

The word for horse is pferd. How can a nation grow great by calling a horse a pferd? It must be such hard work placing bets in Germany.

There have been horses all afternoon. There have been long-legged young ones that the first wind ought to have toppled. And there have been wiser, older ones with doleful faces and the sense to shelter behind a tree. And now and then there have been sleek, graceful horses that pose one leg in front of the other with an air of "I'm gorgeous and don't I know it".

I saw a teenage girl with a horse on a string, carrying a long whip of the sort used by lion-tamers. She was making a brown pferd walk round and round so often that, at somewhere between a walk and a trot, it had worn a circular track in the grass.

The horse had a saddle on its back. No one was in the saddle but the girl wore jodhpurs (reithose in German, apparently) and a sleeveless, insulated jacket. Her message was "I may not be riding a horse but, golly, I could leap on one at any moment."

And so horses and the annoying aspects of German have been the feature of the day. That and the hills that have introduced small and even large woods. I'd ride in sun-dappled shade and then out into villages as dead as ever. Northern Germany has a talent for dead villages. Most have somewhere to turn a man's hopes to coffee. But they turn out to be plumbing shops or somewhere to mend a lawnmower.

So, today has been pleasant but unremarkable. It has been an exercise in getting me closer to Denmark, which I should see in a couple of days. I'll be happy about that. Germany boasts endless kilometres of bike paths, all of them compulsory, but a great many are uneven, their broken surface made more dangerous by tree roots. Germany's bike paths make Belgium's blissful.

Today's ride: 121 km (75 miles)
Total: 3,614 km (2,244 miles)

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