August 29, 2022
Day 20: To Lohne
“Welcome on board for this morning’s short one-hour ride to Vechta. The seat belt sign is on so please make sure your seat belt is securely fastened and we do ask that you remain in your seat with the seat belt fastened for the duration of the ride today,” I said as I clipped Kevin in to the trailer. “Your steward will be pointing out the emergency exit to you now, which is at the front of the trailer and can be accessed by screaming loudly. We thank you for travelling with us today and wish you a pleasant journey.” At about this point I noticed the caravaners at the next site looking over at me a bit funny. They must have been reading my blog. Actually, I noticed that their bikes aren’t even e-bikes, they were just faster than us, so well done them.
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It had been a bit of a tough start to the day after a much better night. We had hoped to spend most of the morning at the campsite but someone had been making a lot of noise with some electric saw or something, which disturbed Kevin’s first nap of the day after only ten minutes. That meant we had to pack up and with light rain and cold air we worried about how Kevin’s sleeping bag would get a chance to dry, because of course he had done a massive poo that had got out of his nappy and out of his baby gro and out of his trousers and onto the sleeping bag. Washing it at the campsite was easy but would it dry in time? Any other day, any other day Kevin, and it would have dried so fast.
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I had planned to go to a supermarket in Vechta but there was no place to sit near it, so after a lot of faffing about we rode off and found a playground instead. Unfortunately at this moment the sun came out and as there was no shade we had to abandon the playground. Finally we ended up on a patch of grass that looked a bit like someone’s lawn but probably wasn’t because there was a bench and a public bin on it. There was also a big old tree that looked like it was being eaten from the inside which provided excellent shade, or would have done had the sun not disappeared again the moment we arrived.
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I was surprised by the size of Vechta and it was quite a few unpleasant kilometres before we got out of town to the south. We’d had enough of main roads and left the bike path to ride on some small roads the rest of the way. It was much more pleasant cycling.
We could have gone straight to our hosts for the night but our early start meant we were ahead of schedule and they weren’t home yet. So we took another break in a playground approximately 150 metres from their house. I rode off to a nearby Aldi to get the shopping done and when I returned Dea told me that our hosts were home and had messaged that we were welcome to come over.
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It was a strange situation with our hosts that had to be explained a couple of times before we really understood. When we got there the man we were being hosted by, Mike, wasn’t there, but his 19 year old daughter, Tabia, was there to show us around. Also there was another cyclist who was also camping in the yard, a woman named Daniella who has spent the summer cycling around Germany and a few other countries. It seemed as if Daniella was showing us around more than Tabia, as if it were her own house. Then we found out the reason for that and the strange thing about all this is that Daniella is in fact Tabia’s mother. Her and Mike split up but remain really good friends, and so now she was visiting as a part of her trip and getting to see her kids as well. So she was kind of our host and kind of a guest.
Mike soon came home and we had a nice time chatting with him and with Daniella. They were both such lovely people full of smiles and laughter. There were also some funny contradictions in them - Daniella had apparently been smoking 40 cigarettes a day until a couple of years ago when she started cycling and getting fit. It was hard to imagine. Also hard to imagine was that the 46 year old Mike, sitting before us in his smart work clothes, had just got back from a three day techno rave in Amsterdam.
It was a lot of fun spending some time with them and they seemed to still get along so well it was hard to know why they were separated. Later on Dea and I remarked on how it was really a big theme of our tour - really almost all of our hosts so far have been divorcees or have separated from the people they had children with. I don’t know if it’s just a coincidence or if people who are divorced are more likely to want to have strangers sleep in tents in their garden, but it was really developing into a trend. It certainly gives us pause for thought as Dea and I start our life as a family together. “Let’s never split up,” we promise to one another as we fall asleep next to our beautiful boy in his dinosaur sleeping bag. And yes, it did get dry.
Today's ride: 24 km (15 miles)
Total: 682 km (424 miles)
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