Day 13: To the forest

August 22, 2022

It was a good night at the campsite with Kevin only waking up once, although he did spend an annoying amount of the night rolling over onto my mattress.

It was another beautiful morning and we were ready to go early. There were no options for hosts or even paid campsites on our route for today, so tonight we would probably have to wild camp for the first time on this trip. It was something we’d done a thousand times before, but it was quite exciting to think about doing so with little Kevin for the first time.

We started the day with some bike path next to a busy road that took us to Lamstedt for our first break. It was only when we got here that I realized we had been here before. I knew it because just ahead of us was a forest where we had once tried to wild camp while cycling this way before, but it had been completely impossible because there had been giant ants literally everywhere through the whole forest. It was a reminder that wild camping wasn’t always easy, and that made us a bit more nervous about our plans for the evening.

We had a nice two hour break and got some shopping done, then rode onwards through the ant forest where there were no sign of any giant ants today.

An hour later and we were once again ready to pause for a two hour break. Cycling with a baby really isn’t that bad, you know! This break was on some grass in Alfstedt and Dea was so exhausted from the hour of cycling since the last break that she fell asleep.

I walked off with Kevin so that she wouldn’t be disturbed and could get a bit of a nap in. Luckily there was something interesting to show Kevin because the house across the road had lots of strange things outside it, wooden figures and stuffed people and all sorts of random things. It was a bit odd, but there was also a bench to sit on, with a friendly companion.

As I sat there I noticed an older woman on a touring bike coming along the very quiet road. She was walking pushing her bike though, and seemed to be looking around at everything with great curiosity. When she got to this very interesting house she got so excited that she accidentally dropped her bike, the noise of which sadly brought Dea’s nap to a premature end. Dea and I both walked over to check she was okay, and the woman said she was and that she was so interested in everything because she had been born here in Alfstedt. She asked us about our trip and asked where it was we slept. We told her people often let us camp in their gardens and for a moment I wondered if we might get ourselves a place to stay, especially as the woman seemed keen to invite us to see her lovely garden with beans and zucchinis growing in it. But alas she lives in Hannover now, and that would require us to find about 25 other gardens to stay in along the way before we got to hers.

The woman went on her way and we went back to the grass and gave Kevin some food that I had bought at the supermarket earlier, a pumpkin and potato mash. He seemed to like it but couldn’t finish the whole portion, and then Dea came up with the idea to just eat the rest herself. “How much do these cost?” she asked, “we could eat them for dinner. They are so healthy, it’s just pumpkin and potato, a little water and oil. You don’t need all those other ingredients. Why do we put all that in our food?”

She took a bite.

“Oh, it’s a little bland. I’ll get the lemon pepper.” And she went and found the seasoning and added it to the dish. “This lemon pepper has eight ingredients in it,” she noticed.

Well Dea enjoyed her meal, repeating her assertion that it was good food and asking why we don’t eat such pure food ourselves, perhaps forgetting the extra eight ingredients she had added to make it taste less bland. “Tastes like eating avocado,” she said. And yes, Dea does add lemon pepper seasoning to her avocado.

As if all this wasn’t bizarre enough, things got even weirder on the next stretch of road into Ebersdorf where we saw many, many more of the stuffed people doing all sorts of things. I want to call them Guys but they have no reason to even know who Guy Fawkes is in Germany, much less celebrate Guy Fawkes Night in the middle of August. We don’t know what was going on but honestly it was all a bit freaky.

With all that weirdness going on it felt good to leave the main road and head off towards a forest on a very quiet little road. I had done my research and found a big forest that had no houses in it and was far from any towns so we had a good chance of being undisturbed.

It was almost perfect - there seemed to be nobody else in the forest and it felt like we had it all to ourselves. The only problem was that there were no good places to actually get into the forest with a trailer and to hang out with a baby. It would have been no problem at all just the two of us, but Kevin added an extra layer of complexity. We were going around on the forest roads for the best part of an hour looking for somewhere. At one point we were going to just camp beside an old walking path (and some cool mushrooms) but then a man walking his dog cane along and we became terribly afraid that he might be the Tent Police. He wasn’t.

Eventually we found a place, visible from one of the forest roads but having only seen one person in an hour we figured it would be okay. The forest was clearly mostly only used by loggers and hunters and in both cases it seemed that if any came along it would be better they see us than not anyway.

We had a nice evening together. Kevin was so happy, he seemed to really love being out in the natural environment, and it felt right to be in such a place with him. Wild camping with a baby, at least in a country like Germany, isn’t easy, but it is really great to get to do it with him at least once.

Today's ride: 29 km (18 miles)
Total: 516 km (320 miles)

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