Day 8: To Beringstedt

August 17, 2022

It was a bit of a tough night with Kevin making noise every couple of hours. He doesn’t even always wake up, just makes a loud scream in his sleep. It’s very endearing.

Before we left Bodo wanted to get a photo with all of us in for his guestbook, which he then sent to me to put on my blog. Unfortunately at the moment the photo was taken I was in the midst of encouraging Kevin to look the right way, so I think I will forever be remembered in Bodo’s guestbook as a funny looking fellow:

We had to cycle through Rendsburg and it was quite a complicated route and quite stressful trying to find the right way without Kevin waking up. It took a long time to get through the centre and when we finally did we came to a tunnel under the Rendsburg Canal that some of you may remember as a scene of extremely high drama during my attempt to travel around the world using only my bicycle and boats, when I was not allowed to ever be powered horizontally by anything. If you don’t know the story, that’s probably a good thing, but rest assured, diagonal elevators are not even a thing.

Don’t worry everyone, we are definitely not being moved diagonally here.

Eventually we made it out of Rendsburg and cycled on a bike path to Jevenstedt. It looked so nice with trees lining the path and offering shade on another hot day. Unfortunately every single one of those trees had roots that had caused damage to the path, so it was painfully slow progress.

Jevenstedt is quite a big place but is sorely lacking in parks and playgrounds, something we found out to our cost as a baby who had been patient with our slow progress until now began to express his displeasure. We had to make do with sitting in the cemetery. Which was okay, and all the people that came by were very friendly and maybe also a bit surprised.

We only let him play with them with the plastic wrapping still on. Don’t worry, plastic wrapping is his absolute favourite thing to play with.

More bike path after Jevenstedt, but now it was in good condition and wide enough for me and Dea to actually ride next to one another. We played 20 questions and it was really fun cycling together like that, just like old times. But again there were no good options for our next break, and we ended up sitting at a bus shelter to get out of the sun. Kevin didn’t seem to mind.

We had to do a third session of cycling today in order to get to our host for the night. It was in a village called Beringstedt and to get there we had to leave the main road and it looked on the map like we would have to cycle on smaller roads. But it turned out that these also had bike paths next to them, so we did it all on bike paths today.

We had organized a place to stay through ‘one night tent’ which is the German version of ‘brug min baghave’. Once again our hosts were not going to be home but had said we were welcome to camp in the garden, and a woman was coming to meet us to show us around. We arrived at the address just as a woman pulled up in a car. She was really friendly, but wasn’t the woman we were looking for and told us that we were in fact at the wrong house. Lucky she came home when she did, or she might have found a family of strangers settling in to her backyard.

Wrong house, but she was very friendly about it.

The woman knew where we should be because it was just next door. We went there and the woman who was supposed to meet us came along in her car and showed us around. It was a lovely old house with a nice garden with fruit trees and things and a stable with horses. Best of all was a nice sheltered terrace where we opted to spend the evening and put up the tent. We chose to do this because of thunderstorms in the forecast and as I write this the rain is lashing down on the roof above us, thunder rumbles and great flashes of lightning illuminate the peacefully sleeping baby beside me. I wonder how long it will last.

Today's ride: 33 km (20 miles)
Total: 408 km (253 miles)

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