July 17, 2015
The idea
It is probably the coldest winter we have had for years, about 5 days of frosts in a row (we usually only get one or two each winter). Ken has finished pruning all the grapes so surely it is time for us to go on "our next last cycle tour". As usual we will be hunting down ancient tractors and looking for great cups of coffee but this year we have three exciting reasons for riding across Europe from Frankfurt to Nice.
Reason 1
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Hanau is a small town about 30km from Frankfurt. It is here that Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm the well known authors of Grimm's Fairy Tales were born. The brothers were academics who were cultural researchers, they collected the local stories. Their first book published was ' Children's and Household Tales'. I bought a copy of the original English translation and it is full of incest, infanticide, rape and murder. In fact it is so grusome I had nightmares. These stories have been sanitised to the extent that children can listen to them and still sleep at night. Disney of course has given them a further sugar coating.
If you look at the pretty map that I got from Germany you wiil see the places of your childhood memories that we will cycle through. We will pass through Hamlin, look at Sleeping Beauty's Castle, cycle through Red Riding Hoods Woods (keeping a good eye out for the wolf) and eventually arrive at Bremen where we will leave this make belief world.
The next part through Northern Germany and Netherlands will link us to the second reason for this trip.
We live in Pokeno a small rural village with around 800 residents about 50 km from Auckland, New Zealand. On the War Memorial in the Village are the names of 15 men killed in World War 1. I have researched these names and using the excellent Commonwealth War Graves site have located the graves or memorials of 10 of these in the Belgium, Northern France Area. Our intention is to visit these and put a poppy on each of them, a poppy that comes from their far away home of Pokeno. One of the interesting things is that a number of the names are still names that are well known in our area.
We will pedal on to Paris where we will visit our lovely niece Louise and her family before we set out on our third more personal reason.
My Aunty Pat (after whom I am called) was a beautiful and elegant waman who at the start of World War 2 was living in Paris with her partner. They were not married and she of course had no French papers, she only had a New Zealand Passport. On the night before the Nazis invaded Paris the pair of them escaped by bicycle and it took them 2 months to reach Nice where Amand had a house. It must have been a nightmare journey with the constant threat of Pat's lack of appropriate ID being discovered. In a letter she smuggled out to my Grandmothers she says they often slept under bridges and in hay barns. Comfortably we will attempt to recreate this journey with the great luxury of sleeping comfortably without the fear of being caught and sent to a concentration camp.
Only 12 more sleeps until we are off!
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