Day 19: To Goldenstedt

August 28, 2022

It was a bit of a tough night with little Kevin waking up many times, so there wasn’t the best mood about packing up and getting on our way quite early. Most cyclists wouldn’t need to start the day early with only 30 kilometres in the schedule, but for us it would mean three cycling sessions and two two-hour breaks, so a good seven hours in all. So we had better be ready to leave when Kevin was ready for his first nap!

The mood was at least lifted minisculey by the resurrection of a bright orange flag to the trailer. Dea had the other day found a little orange flag at the side of the path that had obviously been lost from another cycle trailer. I fitted it this morning and it cheered me up to think that maybe we are all losing our flags and finding other people’s. Hopefully some lucky cycling family found Dea’s brilliant big orange flag the day after they lost their own, although they would have to be cycling in the River Elbe or more likely the North Sea by now.

The only downside was that the orange flag was so small that we wanted to keep the hi-viz on there as well.

While taking the photo of the flag I noticed that Jonas and Sara’s 250 year old house was about to fall down, and I thought it was time to move our baby.

There was a most unfortunate moment as we made our way through Bassum on this quiet Sunday morning. A young boy was cycling the other way along the path with his mum, their dog bounding alongside them. The boy gave us a cheery “moin” as he approached and we responded in kind and it would have been a lovely moment had the dog not got a bit excited and run across the boy’s path, causing him to come off his bike right beside us. He seemed to be okay though, apart from the shock, and the dog was alright too apart from maybe from the swipe the angry mum gave at it. And then the rest of our morning ride was quite uneventful as we cycled along on a bike path next to a main road. You might be struggling to picture it, so here’s a picture:

We took our first break at a park in Twistringen, where Dea felt so exhausted from the bad night that she took a nap. I walked away with Kevin to show him the park and so that Dea, unless a careless woman, born in Twistringen, should drop her bike nearby, could get some sleep. After half an hour of lying motionless, presumably sleeping, I saw Dea get up so I returned to ask if she had had a good nap. “No I couldn’t really sleep here. I would look homeless and there are some people walking past.” Dea was in quite a bad mood so I sensibly resisted pointing out that she looked precisely the same amount of homeless lying there looking like she was sleeping as she would have done lying there and actually sleeping.

I took the trailer from Twistringen and we got off the bike path and followed some small roads instead. This was really nice to do, and it took us through some open farmland where there were many wind turbines. We passed very close to one and it was a bit alarming to see a sign warning to watch out for falling ice. Of course nothing to worry about in August, but a terrifying image that won’t have me hurrying back this way in winter.

The trailer had been making a funny noise for a while but it had been getting a lot worse this day, so at our next break I tried to fix it. The problem seemed to stem from the new tyres we’d got in Rendsburg. No matter what I tried I hadn’t been able to seat them properly on the rims and the wheels had therefore not been going around very straight. I tried again now and with them now being broken in a bit I was able to get them to seat properly. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to stop the noise which I think might be coming from one of the hubs, possibly because the wheel hasn’t been going around straight. Anyway, the wheel still goes around and the main problem is the noise it makes is quite annoying. “Let’s hope for headwinds all the way so we can’t hear it,” Dea, who was in a much better mood now, joked, “or we could just cycle next to main roads all the way!”

One of Kevin’s absolute favourite things to do is to eat people’s caps.

There was another rusty old bike at this rest stop.

There was an information board at our rest stop that informed us that the hamlet we were in, Natenstedt, was 800 years old, making Jonas and Sara’s house seem positively modern.

“It’s 800 years old,” I remarked to Dea.

“What? The bike?” she joked.

There were also an extraordinary number of motorcycles going by on this section of road. Don’t know why. Luckily we didn’t have to cycle on it more than a couple hundred metres.

Our final cycling session was fairly uneventful. We got back onto bike paths and there were quite many cyclists out for Sunday rides, almost all of them on e-bikes. A friend of ours once told us that she would think to herself “e-bike cheat!” whenever she would be passed by someone on an e-bike. Ever since she said that I have imagined yelling that at e-bikes that pass me too. For anyone reading this who uses an e-bike, I don’t think you are cheating, I just get it in my head because of what this friend said. Anyway it was lucky I didn’t actually yell it at anyone today because when we got to our campsite in Goldenstedt our neighbours came over from their campervan to chat and told us they had been out cycling today and had passed us. So that could have been awkward.

It was a nice evening at the campsite, and the poster of the butterflies behind our pitch has given our tent the impression of wings, or ears, so that’s pretty awesome.

Today's ride: 31 km (19 miles)
Total: 658 km (409 miles)

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