August 18, 2022
Day 9: To Itzehoe
We had another short day planned so we spent the whole morning at the house relaxing and letting Kevin sleep. It was a nice place to relax and the sheltered roof had done a great job of keeping us dry during the thunderstorm. There had been some incredibly loud thunder during the night but our little man had slept through it all.
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We left around one and cycled on bike paths to Seefeld and then small roads to Warringholz. I’m sure you know all these places. It was rural Germany but at times it really felt more like somewhere more tropical, especially when we passed through patches of forest or where there were lots of ferns at the roadside.
From Warringholz we followed another frustratingly bumpy path to Schenefeld. Dea was towing Kevin today so I just bumped along slowly behind them.
We took our one break of the day at a nice park in Schenefeld. I went to the supermarket nearby and then we relaxed together in the park, had something to eat, fed Kevin, played with Kevin. We are really getting into a rhythm now.
More bike paths followed for the last 12 kilometers into Itzehoe. It was a busy road beside us and not so nice.
Our day got more interesting in the evening when we arrived at our hosts’ house for the night, particularly as our hosts were not home when we arrived. They had left a key out for us so we were able to let ourselves in. It felt really strange to go into a strangers house like that, especially as it was such a beautiful clean house, and we were ourselves not exactly beautifully clean. We didn’t even know our hosts. We had organized it through Anya, a German cyclist who had stayed in our community at the same time as the Dutch family, as this was her brother’s house. All we knew was that he and his wife would be home at some point during the evening.
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It was a little bit awkward when Holger and Sandra walked into the kitchen, me in the middle of making a Spanish omelette. “Welcome to your house,” I joked. I think it must have been very strange for them to come home to that, especially as they don’t usually host warmshowers guests or anything. But they were really very nice people and we had a lovely evening. They didn’t even mind when I tried to flip the Spanish omelette and it went horribly wrong and landed all over their stove. I scraped it back into the pan and carried on, and then we had a lovely evening sitting outside eating it.
It was actually a very nice summers evening with really good company. Holger and Sandra are quite different from us in that they have steady lives and good jobs and haven’t travelled so much, but they were easy to get along with and have a similar passion for exercise and keeping fit, which had been obvious enough from the time trial bike we’d seen hanging on the wall, and the way they had come home dressed in cycling gear after cycling 30 kilometers home from work. They do triathlons and other events. In fact this weekend they will be doing a swimrun - an event that involves lots of swims with runs in between. It involves swimming with running shoes on (you can get special shoes with holes in for swimruns!) and you are also allowed to use hand paddles, leg buoys and flippers in the swim if you want, so I imagine it must be quite the sight to watch as of course you have to carry all that with you on each run between the swims. It sounds like a fun sport, maybe I will give it a try one day!
Today's ride: 23 km (14 miles)
Total: 431 km (268 miles)
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