Looking for Hansel and Gretel

Looking out the bedroom window for a snapshot of Wednesday's weather and it looks a little breezy, with a few small patches of blue in the sky and, most importantly, it is DRY!

After breakfast and dumping our bags in reception for somebody else to bother about, we head out beside the first lake of the day, onto the first trail of the day, through the first forest of the day. The day turned out to be very picturesque, but for most of the time we were on narrow trails of either sandy earth, packed dirt, tarmac or, for one really pleasant and very long winding stretch, brick coloured blocks, all of which wound their way up and down through stretches of forest with dozens of lakes appearing and disappearing all day. Today was our first experience of anything but flat, although none of the ups and downs lasted more than a few minutes.

The forest stretches are very dense, with trees planted only a few feet apart in every direction, but the trees all seem relatively young despite their great height. We also pedalled past large piles of cut tree trunks at frequent intervals, as might be expected in Germany all precisely stacked and cut to exactly the same length of something like 3 meters / 10 feet. Despite the vast quantities of freshly cut and stacked wood, we haven't so far heard the sound of a single chainsaw or seen any evidence of the people who obviously cut trees on a very large scale all the time.

As we approached a place called Wesenberg, our route guide stated "you can see boulder from Scandinavia, there is also a point to watch a Stork's nest". We didn't think Colorado was viewable from that far away and were not sure what size stone or rock we should be looking for. However, we did see two stork's perched atop tree trunks that had had the tops cut off them. We wandered around behind a fire station and the grounds of an industrial company to take several photos before the birds got camera shy and took flight to fly around in circles a short distance away.

Our destination for the day was Neustrelitz. It was obvious as we cycled in that it was an important city sometime in the past. The palace gardens have acres of grass and flowers with rows of statuary leading up to....... drum roll........ nothing. Some of the buildings appeared to be recently restored while the others are derelict. Checked into our room, with the help of the Internet, we found that like every town we have visited the palace was destroyed in 1945. There is an air of prosperity as much of the city, including the harbor, has been beautifully rebuilt. Several enormous brick buildings facing the water, which are now obviously apartment blocks, have the overall appearance of old granaries or mills that have been rebuilt and converted for re-use. The brickwork of each of them is pristine and looks brand new, but the style of building and the elaborate designs in the brickwork and decorative woodwork on gables and eaves suggest architecture from the past.

Mike and I chose a nice restaurant with a balcony in the town square for dinner. We sat at the end of a long table. Part way through our dinner a gentleman sitting two seats down struck up a conversation. Although German he had lived in the United States for many years and was anxious to discuss his German home and U.S. and world politics. Mike and I enjoyed the comfort of speaking in our native language and not fumbling around with our primitive German. Once we left Berlin we were surprised how few people have any understanding of English. We keep,our dictionary close.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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