October 9, 2022
Day 4: To Anrath
The noise sounded like someone was moving furniture around, scraping it on the floor above our heads. We thought it wouldn’t last long but it went on for hours and stopped Dea from sleeping. I went out to try and find out what it was, but the noise could be heard everywhere on all floors of the hotel and the hotel staff didn’t know what it was. Our best guess would be that it was the heating pipes, perhaps being turned on for the first time this year or something. It was a really irritating noise, and there was only one positive.
“At least Kevin is sleeping through it,” I said.
Literally two seconds later and Kevin woke up screaming.
You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?
At some point the noises stopped and we slept okay in the end. And it was undoubtedly the right decision to take the hotel when come morning we could see frost on the fields outside on our way down for breakfast. No place for a baby and a tent! The breakfast was a decent buffet that gave us half a chance to recoup some of our 115 euros.
Thankfully it was a sunny day and, although it was still cold when we set out we wrapped Kevin up nice and warm. As for us, we had a long hill to warm us up. Literally right across the border, after the complete flat of Holland, the road went uphill. In fact there were lots of hills through the morning (Dea who wasn’t towing a trailer didn’t notice.)
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I had planned our day so that we could take our first break close to a Lidl and restock our supplies at a cheap German supermarket. We were almost there when I suddenly remembered that it was Sunday. All German supermarkets are closed on Sundays. This was very disappointing. Luckily we always carry a healthy surplus of food so we weren’t going to starve, but there were going to have to be some unusual meal choices.
We found a nice place for our first break, at the edge of an open field on a quiet little road with almost no traffic but lots of friendly people walking and cycling by. Dea very much enjoyed her sandwich - humus and cheddars. Not cheddar, cheddars, which are little English biscuits with a bit of cheddar flavour. We were all out of cheese, you see. Dea enjoyed it very much.
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We had some bike paths beside roads, but then we left them for a bit and took small roads across the countryside. The landscape opened up a lot and it reminded me of being in Turkey, or somewhere, far away. Several times I felt reminded of places I’d been before, a corner that reminded me of Kazakhstan for example, and I wondered if it was because I didn’t want this to end. This was our last cycling day of the trip, it was all going to be over soon and maybe I was pretending it wasn’t, kidding myself that I was out in the world riding around forever, like I used to.
Our last break of the trip was in a really nice town park. We sat down and went through the usual routine of feeding ourselves and feeding Kevin and reminisced about the first break we had taken at the start of the trip two months ago. It felt like so much more time must have passed. We had experienced so many things, got so much out of this time together. There are no words for how special this trip has been, how good for all of us.
I noticed that there were leaves falling occasionally from a couple of big trees near us and so I started playing Catch the Leaf, finding that the game worked even better without a bicycle. Dea joined in too and we had great fun trying to catch leafs, which is a lot harder than you might imagine. Kevin watched on and we talked about how much fun it will be when he is old enough to join in with such games.
But when I had a moment to myself to look at my phone I found myself googling how to sow a lawn. And as we moved on I realised that while I was reminded of cycling in other countries, I was just as often reminded of cycling in Odense, the town where I work, in a job I missed. This had been such a great, great trip, yes, but there was a great life waiting for us back at home too, and I realised that was what I really wanted now as we cycled the final few kilometres towards our goal.
Our goal was of course Anrath, a place I’m sure very few of you have ever heard of. We chose this location because it was the best way for us to get onto the German regional train system without having to cycle into a big city. And it felt like the right decision as we cycled into town without hardly seeing a single car and made our way to our guesthouse. This one was nicer and more reasonably priced at 75 euros, and it also didn’t make any strange noises at us. A perfect place to sit and eat our wraps for dinner then. The filling of our wraps? Instant mashed potato and paprika coated peanuts. We were looking forward to visit an Aldi before getting on our first train in the morning.
Our plan from here was to take regional German trains all the way to Flensburg on the Danish border. This was because bike access should be much easier on the regional trains and we could get a cheap ticket that would allow us to use any of the trains. It was theoretically possible to get all the way to Flensburg in one day but with four changes it was going to be a challenge. It surely couldn’t be as much of a challenge as acquiring the tickets, though.
I’d already spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out how to buy tickets online for us and the bikes and concluded that it must be easier at the station, so I walked there after dinner. It was a tiny station though, just two open air platforms, no building. There was a ticket machine though, with an English language button. That just changed the heading though, all of the ticket names were in German and there were really a lot of ticket options. I tried asking some German people waiting for a train but they didn’t know how to buy the tickets I needed either. It was all very confusing. I was using my phone to translate things, but then I dropped that and completely broke the screen (which is why there are no photos taken by me of this day.) Then when I eventually thought I knew what tickets to buy the card reader wouldn’t work.
I walked back a little frustrated. Luckily I had a new phone with me that I had bought in England, as the other one was getting very old anyway, so I began to set that up when I got back to the hotel. At the same time Dea contacted Matthias, a German who had stayed with us through warmshowers earlier in the year and had given us some good advice about the trains. He replied with links on where we could buy the tickets online. It took hours but eventually I got my new phone working and finally bought the tickets that we needed for us and the bikes.
Exhausting stuff! The next day taking five different trains across Germany with a baby was surely going to be a breeze by comparison!
Today's ride: 34 km (21 miles)
Total: 1,266 km (786 miles)
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