It's Tuesday morning, time for our first day of cycling, and the weather is grey and a little chilly. That wasn't in our plan! We retrieve our bikes from the steel cage at the back of the hotel where we left them last night after fitting our pedals and doing a quick spin around the car park. We seem to be the first to set off and with a couple of turns find our way from the town onto the bike trail beside a lake. The air feels damp, but at least it isn't raining........
Twenty minutes later it is drizzling rather too much to brave in only bike jerseys, so we stop to put our jackets on. Saving valuable space in our suitcases, we have only brought lightweight showerproof clothing rather than our waterproof stuff, so we are hoping not to end up riding in squalls or tempests. We pass other cyclists who have stopped to don additional weatherproof layers, including a family of four riding a sort of double-tandem machine with the two halves hinged in the middle. Oh, and a trailer tagged on the back. They wave as we pass and we see them again later.
After a while we are soaked, not too warm, and have soggy shoes and feet. Mike has glasses covered in rain and is trying to read our route instructions through the polythene folder on his handlebar bag which is also covered in a layer of rainwater, and as we stop each time to turn to the next page of our instructions we realise that the map holder is letting water in and the pages of our route are getting glued together. Eleven days of instructions getting stuck together on day one is not too encouraging!
As we approach Zehdenick, we decide that the time is right for 'elevenses' and stop at a small backerie for coffees and pastries to warm up. A British couple who also picked up bikes at our hotel yesterday arrived a little later looking similarly damp.
We traveled through forests, along canals, around lakes, and quickly into and out of small villages. So far there are none of the picturesque hamlets and impressive castles of southern Germany. In our guide book there are a few mentions of castles that existed before WW II and we traveled past many vacant and dilapidated buildings from previous centuries.
We did extremely well following the maps for the first sixty kilometers. And then . . . we are still not sure where we fell off the rails. With only three villages to go we found ourselves on a narrow road with fast moving traffic. Although we were headed in the right direction we added a few kilometers to our overall total. We were so close to our destination we could have throw a rock and hit the town center but we could not seem to find it. Our mistake was looking for a town. It was two restaurants, a hotel, an information center, and a few other private buildings set in one short street beside a lake. Having finally arrived we went into the information center to ask the location of our hotel. With a puzzled look the lady pointed to a building across the road and down one building. Additional note: Under the info center is a three lane bowling alley packed with bored locals or tourists disgusted with the weather.
As we checked in with the landlord of our hotel - a significant downgrade from the Berlin Marriott - we had a stilted no German versus not much English mini-conversation in which he told us he had "sixteen bicyclists staying. - it is too much", only some of whom were part of the contingent that had begun with us. The first requirement? To unglue the pages of our ride instructions and map book. Mike spent ten minutes with the hotel hair drier separating each page and produced a masterwork of crinkled wavy pages and a book twice as thick as it had originally been, but at least it was now usable as something other than a door stop.
As a consequence of our elevenses, additional mileage, and being in the middle of nowhere, we had somehow missed out on lunch. It was obviously time for afternoon tea instead. We wandered 150 yards along the road to the first of two restaurants, expecting a glass display case exploding with elaborate fresh cakes and pastries. There was not a solitary stale strudel to be seen, but we spotted a waitress walking past us with a desert of some sort and sat down at a table to ask for "one of those" only to be told that was the last one. So we walked another 100 yards to the second and final option, asked for a dessert menu and the lady asked us to get up and follow her. I have to admit she had a glass display case, but the display consisted of photos of three choices. We pointed at a berry cheesecake sort of thing, asked for zwie pieces unt zwie coffees and, hey presto, we were in business.
Later, after showering, we returned to restaurant number one of two for dinner. We ordered a carafe of red wine by pointing at the red wine page of the menu. Despite much stabbing with her stylo, the young waitress couldn't get her electronic tablet to work, so she resorted to pen and pad and copied it down longhand. Minutes later the owner arrived with a carafe of white wine! It was taken back and our red eventually arrived. The food turned out to be OK, the service continued as hmmmm, and at the end Mike indicated he wanted to pay by credit card. The young waitress said he would have to pay inside rather than at the table. She swiped the card every possible way in the machine before saying it needed to be a Euro bank card. It was a Euro bank card. She went away to talk to the owner, then came back and said the machine would only accept German credit cards! Well that turned out to be interesting; we didn't have enough cash and sat at our table expecting to be told the German-only credit card software had suddenly become aware it could after all accept credit cards from anywhere else in the world. Instead, the young waitress returned to our table with a sheet of paper showing their bank account and BACS (international credit transfer) numbers for us to send the balance when we got home. But she also wanted a passport number. Where were our passports? At our hotel 100 yards up the road. Off went Jan to retrieve a passport, which the waitress duly wrote down. What could they possibly do with this passport number? We couldn't imagine. We wandered back to our hotel wondering if Interpol might chase us down before we pedalled northwards across the Baltic beyond the German border.
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