April 22, 2022
Day 10: Wittenberge to Domitz
Power, heat, kaboom!, house flat!
The story of today is mainly one of straight riding on the dike top, with a flood plain and the river on our left, and a passing panorama of fields, cows, birds, and villages on the right. The first aspect of this was the enjoyment we had in simply being out in such wide open spaces (and almost completely free of cars). We asked ourselves whether the landscape could be considered "spectacular", and we decided that you really need mountains somewhere around for that. Also this area has UNESCO status and generally describes itself as a nature reserve. So that's gotta be good.
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2 years ago
As much as we appreciated the view to our left, there was some real action to our right. As usual, we innocently (ignorantly) rolled up to it. It was a metal tower, that we assumed was for bird watching. Dodie said "oh look, you can climb that and have an overview of the lovely countryside or maybe see some extra birds". So we stopped, and also eyed a nearby picnic table, thinking maybe we would declare lunchtime. While we were thinking about that, a man came up and asked us the Usual Questions. This lead to a bit more discussion, during which the man pointed out the signage on the side of the "bird watching" tower.
Great Scott! Our lovely Elbe turns out to have been part of the border of the GDR, and for 95 km both behind and ahead of us, it was watchtowers, blown up bridges, land mines!, patrol boats, and people drowning trying to swim across. Our tower was not for watching birds!
Well I climbed it anyway, and did spot a cyclist down there. Not difficult, since she wears yellow. Good thing I forgot my Kalashnikov.
The sign says in part:
"The construction of the border fortifications began in 1952: the border fence ran on the Elbe dyke, which was followed by a 500 m wide protective strip. The roads leading to the border area were cordoned off at the entrance to the 5 km exclusion zone with permanently manned security police posts. Many Elbe villages were in the protective strip, the town of Lenzen was part of the restricted zone until 1972. The border security systems were gradually expanded, and minefields and self-firing systems were set up."
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The idea that we are not on Vancouver Island anymore was made obvious by the wide open spaces (our perspectives normally are bounded by tall forests), and now by the rude reminder of the somewhat recent history here. Next along was a metal statue, looking to the river and depicting Charon. Charon, in Greek mythology, is the son of Erebus and Nyx (Night), whose duty it was to ferry over the Rivers Styx and Acheron those souls of the deceased who had received the rites of burial. Errrm, ok.
But the real feeling of something different came from a change in the village houses. We had easily grown accustomed to the solid buildings with quality windows and doors and super, often shiny, tile roofs. Now suddenly we were looking at crouching buildings with thatched roofs, much like in Netherlands. The villages looked like they should house dwarfs or hobbits, and the peaks of the roofs had strangely symbolic crossed chess knight cutouts.
We jumped ambiance once again, as we entered the town of Domitz. Now we had multiple bakeries, and multiple food stores. Dodie dove into one and came out with a stash of great stuff. she characterized this as junk for me and good stuff for her. Here in the shopping cart, the so called junk is on the left. Hey, my pile is so small! And who says Knoppers and Chocolate Milch Reis is junk.
What we were trying to do with this store visit was to prepare for the looming advent of Sunday, when we expect food to be hard to come by. In addition, our nearby stay for tonight has neither a restaurant nor included breakfast, so we need to be stocked up.
That stay was a place about 4 km out of Domitz, in a place called Heidhof. Now calm down, Steve, that's not Heidihof, which is coming only after we make it to Switzerland.
The place, which was found on Booking, styled itself a B&B, only it des not seem to offer breakfast, so it's just a B. It turned out to be a large building with ten double occupancy rooms. A lock box yielded our key to the front door and the room itself. So far so good.
The fun began as we looked at a sign on the front door pointing right, to the bicycle garage. We looked right. We walked right, to the next building, which held the single rooms. We circled our building. Nothing.
OK, we phoned the number posted on the front of the building, and got a lady who could only speak a few words of English. We seemed to understand that the bicycles were to go in a room on the ground floor. Then the line dropped. Inside we did find a large empty room, that clearly was once a dining room. Fine, we parked our bikes, pulled the batteries, and headed on up to our room. On the way we encountered an enin agmatic sign. Two things about it were puzzling. First off, we had no idea what a Fahrradakkus was, and next it seemed to threaten a 5 euro charge in the mythical bike garage. We ignored all that and happily snuggled into our room, until shortly - a knock on the door.
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It was a man who seemed to be asking in German how we were doing and had we found everything? We replied that we had not been able to find any bike garage. Ok, he would lead us to it. But looking in the room and seeing our already plugged in batteries, he made it plain that we could not be doing that. "Say what?". "The bike garage is for charging the batteries." "No problem sir, we're fine, we'll stick with charging here". "No, no, you MAY NOT plug in your charger here." "Say what?" "The batteries draw much power, they will heat, there will be fire, they will explode Kaboom, the house will be flattened!"
So I dragged the chargers, which had been used in all sorts of houses, on extension cords and triple splitters etc. out to what the man revealed to be the bike garage. It's a metal shipping container, presumably blast proof, invisible from the main building. But up in the room could be found the padlock combination to open the door of this contraption.
The view from our room reveals the "bike garage".
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From guarded borders to hobbit houses to attempted extortion on plugging in an appliance, we'd have to admit this is a foreign land.
Reason for Living for Today: Wide Open Spaces
Today's ride: 62 km (39 miles)
Total: 431 km (268 miles)
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2 years ago
2 years ago