Wo sind mein Kaffee und meine Kuchen?

July 12, 2023

Our last glimpse of a border post, left as a memory in a village which the fence once divided

WENINGERODE - Germany has many things going for it. It is a pleasant, well-ordered country. It is the land of the economic miracle. People are friendly to a fault. But it has a weak point: an inability to stump up coffee and sticky buns.

It's not as though Germans are resistant to froth and gooey cream. You only have to look at many of them to see that. But they have been persistently hopeless in providing either to revive us on our stately progress.

On the other hand, they do do a pretty decent bike path. I'm relieved because my last experience of bike paths here, or more precisely strips beside the road, was that they hadn't been repaired since armies advanced and retreated over them decades ago. They were crumbling apologies, except that nobody sought to apologise. And you had to put up with them because, then as now, bike paths are compulsory.

Lovely, isn't it? And it comes with a bike rack

There's been a change of heart since then. Cyclists are to be encouraged and pampered. And so, this morning, after an aggravating start straight up an unsheltered hill, we revelled once more in the silky acres of Deutscher Radweg.

And that is how life should be, because this is our last day on our bikes. We have paid our dues to history and we have been rewarded. We have met interesting people and made friends. But no tour can go on for ever.

Turn up in one of the glorious old towns and coffee will be available in all directions. On the road, we were left to suffer unattended

Today, we have ridden through more farmland and across a couple of sizable towns and now we're in a hotel within smoke distance of one of Germany's few steam railways. I'll tell you about that tomorrow.

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