Monday September 8th - Loo roll!

The church bells rang at 4am in Rosport. In continental Europe you get used to bells ringing at 6am or sunrise, but at 4 it was still very dark and I'm not sure what sane person would need or want to hear church bells at that time.

At a slightly more sane hour I set out into another damp and hazy morning, continuing along the river valley. A few miles down the road, a huge structure loomed out of the mist above me - it was the motorway passing high above the valley, supported by enormouse concrete columns. I've never seen a motorway look so beautiful!

At Wasserbillig, I left the bike path for a while to pick up some goodies in the town. I bought the world's tastiest plum tart and some bread from the bakery, a couple of chicken legs and, triumphantly, some loo roll. I've never been so happy to see toilet paper!

After spending quite a lot of time in the town I decided to put in some real miles before lunch. The road was flat so it was easy to set small targets - for example, getting to 25 miles by 11:30am.

The cycle path disappeared for a while and became a red strip at the side of the road. Vineyards became the dominant scenery, and the sun burned away the mist. The Our river flowed into the Moselle and the valley widened out a little.

I reached the 30 mile mark a few miles short of the French border and stopped for a chicken sandwich and to hang my washing on the back of the bike.

I arrived in Schengen, home to all good shared border agreements, shortly after that. There's probably a good reason for the choice of Schengen for that particular treaty - it stands close to the meeting point of three countries. In the space of a couple of minutes I left Luxembourg, crossed the bridge to Germany and turned the corner into France.

A small model of the Eiffel tower marked my passage into France. The cycle path vanished in the town of Apach and all of a sudden fast lorries and cars were whooshing past my shoulder. Then I remembered the first rule of cycling on N roads in France - don't! I dug out my trusty Michelin atlas pages to plan a nice D-route.

Things got hilly that afternoon. I huffed and puffed my way up a tiny little road, across open farmland and through tiny villages in which stood numerous closed and abandoned cafes. It also happened to get very hot, which was nice but also meant a lot of sweat and a lot of suncream. I reached Bouzonville, a reasonably sized town which didn't appear to have any accommodation but at least had a boulangerie where I was able to buy food and water, and a tabac whose owner directed me to the nearest campsite.

I double checked outside by Googling the place on my phone. I hope that doesn't seem like a rude or mistrustful thing to do. I've been sent on a few wild goose chases before, usually unintentional I'm sure - and whereas locals are normally an excellent source of general information about what's in the area, I don't expect the average person to keep a working and up to date knowledge of campsite opening dates and finer details. However, it looked as if the campsite existed and was open so I headed off in that direction.

An hour later, the sun was getting low in the sky when I reached the campsite, a pretty place beside a lake near the small village of Burtoncourt. It was good to pay single digit prices for camping again!

Distance: 59 miles (361 miles so far) • Day 8 Route • Day 8 Photos

UK again

We arrived back in the UK about ten days ago, into the port of Harwich. Which, for a town which is supposed to be welcoming Scandinavian and Dutch travellers into the UK, is depressingly grim - it's not a pretty sight as you approach from the North Sea, nor is it any better once you disembark.

We met a German family while queueing for the ferry - loaded with brightly-coloured Ortlieb panniers, they were from Hamburg and used to make regular trips to Norfolk on the Hamburg-Harwich route, unfortunately it's now closed, so now they have to make the trip to Esbjerg first (although they had taken the train for that part).

The first thing we did on arrival in Harwich was to ride into town in search of our first curry in two months - with the help of a passer-by, we were successful and sat down to a light lunch of chicken jalfrezi and vegetable balti.

On the train home (yes, we got the train - there is a slight obstruction in between Harwich and Surrey, and it's called London) we met another cyclist, Ed, a student who was on his way back from a four-week trip from Calais to Amsterdam. He'd been camping with a mate and, as students do, they had been living off a rice-and-tuna based concoction for pretty much every meal. He'd also previously been on a cycling trip to Norway, which he said was fantastic. Norway's on our list of places-to-go, but moreso on our list of places-to-go-when-we're-rich, the tuna-and-rice lifestyle is not for us.

We parted ways at Liverpool Street station, and dgym and I set out upon a hot, noisy, busy and smelly trip across London. A real shock to the system after the deserted lanes of Denmark. We got on our train at Waterloo and were greeted with the typical UK grumpiness we had missed so much when the guard started frowning at dgym's trike and warning us "that area's meant for three bikes, not one, you'd better make sure you fit within the yellow line" (of course two hours later the whole train would be packed out with sweating commuter bodies and that would be just fine...)

We had a fantastic curry for dinner that evening, and since getting back, we've managed to catch up on a few of the things we've been missing...


So, what happens next?

We're off to Bratislava/Vienna in a couple of weeks, no bicycles so it's not strictly a bike hippy trip but no doubt you'll hear about it anyway. Inbetween now and then, we'll be getting the bikes ready for the next big trip, buying a tent that's big enough for dgym (we are currently arguing over the Vaude Taurus Ultralight and the Terra Nova Laserlarge) and maybe taking a short trip to test everything out.

After Bratislava, we will be spending some time in Dorset on family business, and in late September sailing off to Spain for our autumn/winter trip.

Denmark

hel

On Sunday we left Poland, a little earlier than planned as we'd got a bit tired of the mozzy swatting (a few still managed to get in despite our ingenius contraption) and the heat - although this did mean leaving behind mountains of cheap enormous juicy cherries, and piles of moist delicious cake. Our ferry left at 10pm from Swinoujscie, so we decided to leave our room in the morning and cycle into Germany for one last Eiscafe experience.

This one contained chocolate and vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, topped with two truffles:




This is Eis und Heiss - vanilla ice cream separated from a layer of warm sour cherries by an insulating biscuit layer:



The ferry cabin was cheap, not particularly comfortable but we got a reasonable night's sleep until we were brutally woken at 7am by the announcement that we'd be arriving in an hour and a half, and breakfast was available in the cafe. All excited to wake up in a new place, I jumped out of bed and headed for the decks - on the left you could see the coast of Denmark, with a line of wind turbines queuing up to greet us, and on the right hand side was the huge Oresund bridge from Copenhagen to Malmo, with Sweden in the distance. We're not planning on visiting Sweden in the near future (too expensive), but it was nice to wave at it all the same.

Copenhagen seemed like a pleasant city, lots of nice watery bits and the busiest part seemed to be the cycle lanes. We only really stopped to get money, a map and some pastries but it's probably worth a longer visit at some point when we can afford Danish prices. The pastries were lovely - as well as the familiar fruity-centered wonders you get in England, there are also pastries featuring sesame seeds, poppy seeds and honey. And Danish money is awesome - when you have coins with holes in, that seems like a good enough reason not to adopt the Euro.

Our first day cycling in Denmark wasn't so good, we ended up on a cycle path along a noisy main road from Copenhagen to Roskilde. We weren't in the best of spirits by the time we reached Roskilde, so decided to stop for the night, use the tent for its intended purpose, and head for the town campsite. The campsite was very pretty, on the shores of Roskilde Fjord, you could see the town across the water. It was quite a cramped night as dgym is a bit too long for the tent, but it was lovely to wake up and look out over the water. We also got online that evening and booked our ferry home for two days later - Denmark is about as expensive as England so we can't really afford to stay for long.

On our second day we took the train from Roskilde, taking us away from the island of Sjaelland, across the island of Fyn, and to Kolding, in the east of the Jutland mainland. Getting on the train was a bit of an ordeal - we were warned beforehand that we'd have to disassemble dgym's trike so we spent 45 minutes doing this on the platform before the train arrived, during which we managed to use most of the useful bits and pieces we had with us (cable ties, duct tape, string, luggage straps). We arrived in Kolding about 4pm and spent most of the evening getting to Vejen, by means of lots of pretty little lanes winding through farmland - it was a really lovely afternoon's cycling. We arrived at the campsite in Vejen very hot and grubby and were immediately directed to a restaurant which was about to close but would feed us if we hurried. So we showed up at the restaurant hot and grubby and smelly, freshened up and then had a lovely meal. We got back to the campsite just in time to put up our tent before darkness fell.

On the Wednesday we woke at about 6:30am, eventually decided we weren't going back to sleep, got up, packed and left about 8:30 loaded with fresh water and peanut cookies from the campsite shop, with the aim of getting to Esbjerg for our 7pm ferry. We did pretty well, reached Esbjerg about 1pm and found a Spar and a shady spot, just as the midday heat was threatening to roast us alive, our water levels were very low and we were in need of some lunch (we went a very long way without seeing a shop or pub). We lurked in shady spots all afternoon before boarding the ferry.

We've had a lovely couple of days cycling in Denmark - we've seen hills and flats, fields of wheat, woodland, heathland, cows, horses and lots of butterflies. In many ways it's similar to the Netherlands - a good and well-used cycle network, friendly people who speak incredibly good English, quite expensive, lots of farmland - however, Denmark is hillier and the landscape is more varied, making for more interesting cycling.



dgym

Ordering the ferry tickets back to the UK was done via the internet using my phone - not a very cheap thing to do at all, which explains my panicked state at the time. This is how we ended up with tickets for the Wednesday 19:00 sailing from Esbjerg - which was only four days cycling away. It isn't possible to cycle from one port to the other anyway, you have to get the train over one of the bridges as they didn't bother with a cycle path along the motorway, we just got on the train a little earlier than we had to, and didn't get off quite as soon as we could have. The bridge is 20km across and we were on the train for 200km, but at least we were in a good position to get to our ferry on time.

There was a small problem with taking my trike on the train, the lady at the ticket desk actually came out to look at it and I explained which bits I could take apart and the final decision was that if I disassembled most of it it would probably be ok but it was up to the conductor in the end. So we went to the platform and I spent half an hour taking the front wheels and the seat off and making the trike shorter as well. When the train arrived there wasn't even a hint of a problem from the conductor, and there was plenty of room for the trike in its road going state, but never mind.

By the time the train had arrived in Kolding and I had put everything back together again it was gone four o'clock and we set out for Vejen which was another 20km away. This turned out to be one of the best bits of cycling that I can remember. The sky was perfectly blue but the sun wasn't unbearable and the terrain was varied with some challenging enough hills. The countryside was really beautiful and there were plenty of horses, sheep and cows to see along the way. In a way it was a bit of a shame as it was very similar to England, and it reminded me of how good England would be for cycling if it didn't have such a car problem.

We arrived in Vejen quite late, but one nice thing about camping is that this isn't a problem - there was still plenty of room. One problem in Vejen is that it has 5 pizza/kebab shops and no restaurants, even a friendly local didn't know where a restaurant was, and was quite sure there wern't any left. Luckily the lady at the camping ground knew of one and kindly phoned to check that they were open, which they were but only for the next 20 minutes. So it was a mad dash for food that turned out to be thouroughly worth it - I almost wept when I discovered that the vegetables were lightly curried - followed by another mad dash to get back to the campsite and put up the tent before the sun went down. We made it with about 5 minutes to spare.

Souvenirs

Dear readers,

Those of you who know us personally will be pleased to learn we have been souvenir shopping, and bought a number of these:



Unfortunately, they ran out so you won't all get one. Fortunately, they had plenty of these left:



so everybody should be happy one way or another. You can always swap.

Lots of love,
Hel & Dgym
xxx

We used the tent

Camping enthusiasts will be delighted to learn that we actually used the tent. The ones who are a little bit nitpicky may be disappointed to find out that we didn't actually sleep in it, or even get inside it at all.

Plagued by swarms of mosquitoes, and feeling like they were imprisoning us in a hot stuffy room at night, we had been scouring the shops for a mosquito net for quite some time, without any luck.


Last night in a stroke of genius I got out the tent to see whether there was any netting on it, and if we could somehow use it. There was, but it was going to be tricky to get mosquito-tight coverage across the window, especially as we didn't have enough duct tape to go all the way around.

So Dgym got into inventive mode (you will know what I mean if you remember the Lego mousetrap), got out the tent poles, and found that they could be arranged into a rectangular frame which fit the window almost perfectly. Not wanting to destroy the tent, we sewed the netting so it stretched across the frame, then put the whole thing flush against the open window, secured in place with a few pieces of duct tape, and there we have it. Cool, fresh, mosquito-free air.

Thanks for the tent, Dad. (We're considering actually sleeping in it in Denmark)

PS. Those with an interest in pancakes may be interested / repulsed by the following picture. It is what happens when you accidentally buy yoghurt instead of milk (How was I to know - it said "Milko" and looked like a carton of milk). Take note Molly, Dgym is not the only one who makes funny-looking pancakes. It may look like scrambled pancake, but it tasted good enough.

Fry-up disaster

That little list of stuff we miss should be extended to include the following: Curry, apple crumble, custard, decent fry-up, nachos... er, and you lot of course.

Regarding the fry-up, since we now have a frying pan we thought we'd try one, and went out to purchase the necessary ingredients. This was hampered by a few problems: 1. They don't appear to have baked beans here. 2. The supposed bacon that Dgym purchased from the butchers (it looked like bacon, it was called boczek, etc), when cooked, turned out to just be the world's fattiest piece of pork. 3. The yolks of the eggs kept breaking. The whole thing turned out a bit bland and miserable, so we won't be trying that one again. Sorry, there are no pictures. Trust me, you wouldn't want any.

We have booked our ferry to Denmark. Yes, our plan, as detailed in one of our earliest blog entries and accompanied by a purty map, has changed somewhat. We won't be cycling across the continent to Portugal - we decided we don't really have time to do it without being rushed, especially given that we are constrained by the heat of summer and the cold of winter, and we want to spend some time in the UK seeing our friends and families. In a couple of weeks time we'll be catching the ferry to Copenhagen, cycling across the various islands that make up Denmark, and then sailing from Esbjerg to Harwich.

Whilst in the UK our bikes will receive the love and attention they have earned (mine is all excited about the new chain, cassette, bar tape, damn good clean, etc. it'll be getting) before September, when we'll jump on a Spain-bound ferry (ferries play an important role in our master-plan) and continue our cycling on the Iberian peninsula - Portugal is still most definitely on the cards. To make up for some of the in between bits we'll be missing, we'll fly out to Vienna/Bratislava for a week or two in August. No bikes.

The road here is lined on one side with a steep foresty bank. A little way down the road you look up the bank and see three sets of what looks like giant flights of steps - well, each one's several feet high and they're all crumbling and overgrown. But after looking at the info board at the tiny bunker museum just a little further down the road, in fact these things are the launch ramps from when the Germans prototyped their V3 rocket here (this bit used to be Germany). So, not giant steps then.

We go to Germany and eat ice cream so you don't have to

Following the popularity of photographs from our last Eiscafe visit, and requests for more of the same, we dutifully got on our bicycles on Friday and returned to Germany. Here is a picture of our latest conquest, Lasagne Eis:


Vanilla ice cream, topped with berries and fruit sauce, some tinned fruit and white chocolate flakes. The verdict: nice, but not as good as the Spaghetti or Steak Eis.


As a special bonus, you also get a picture of a pancake, as we managed to find a small frying pan for 16zl, and had a huge pancake fest on Saturday (well, the pancakes were small but the fest was enormous). Here is one of dgym's pancakes, topped with some blackcurrants.




So that ticks off one thing on the list of stuff we miss. We're still holding out for chocolate brownies, innocent smoothies, pies of all shapes and sizes and clothes that don't smell.

Thursday 15th June - Daytrip to Germany

Since we have ended up staying conveniently close to the German border, we decided to make the most of this yesterday and pay a visit to the seaside town of Ahlbeck, which is about fifteen miles from where we're staying and just over the border from Swinoujscie, where we stayed a couple of weeks ago.

The journey over was pleasant - between here and Swinoujscie it's mostly main road, upon which there is a "slow lane" for tractors and other slow vehicles, and this acts as a pretty good cycle lane. It's nice being able to ride the bikes unladen for a while, and remember what it's like to have some acceleration! Swinoujscie - Ahlbeck was also a nice ride, well-equipped with cycle paths, although on the eastern side of Swinoujscie there are occasions when the paths lead you apparently nowhere, or whoever was making the path has forgotten what they were doing, and you're suddenly on a bumpy pavement littered with lampposts and a huge drop down off the kerb.

One thing we've noticed about cycling in Poland is the dogs. We've seen plenty of dogs in our travels - it's well known amongst cyclists that dogs get pretty excited by bicycles and a favourite hobby of theirs is to give chase to a moving cycle, snapping at the rider's heels. Most dogs do react to our passing by, including some pretty big growly scary looking ones in Germany - but until Poland, it was no bother as they were always penned in by gates and fences. Poles, however, seem happy to let their dogs run loose, yesterday was the third time we'd been chased by a dog (fortunately so far they've all been of the small and yappy variety). I've seen a fair few discussions about this on cycling newsgroups, which suggest solving the dog problem by (a) spraying it with your water bottle (b) shouting "Bed!" or "Down!" at them, well, anything as long as you sound authoritative, especially in Poland where only an educated minority of dogs understand English. Unfortunately, my instinctive reaction is just to pedal faster, which doesn't help because the pedalling motion excites them more, and also because they run faster than you'd think. Eventually, just as it had caught up with my heels, I remembered to shout, and it went away. Dgym was also chased by a wasp yesterday, I'm fairly sure shouting at them doesn't help, but it disappeared before we could try the water technique.

Upon arrival in Ahlbeck, we found ourselves wondering where on earth, if we had chosen to travel by car, we might possibly be able to park it.

Fortunately we had no such problems with our bikes so we headed straight for the seafront and parked up opposite an Eiscafe (our main reason for visiting Germany). After a starter of lemon icecream, we had a very nice ham pizza and tunafish salad, followed up by steak & eggs, and a plate of spaghetti:




The steak dish consisted of a huge slab of chocolate and vanilla ice cream, covered with whipped cream, two peach halves, chocolate sauce and sprinkly bits. Dgym's spaghetti was made up of lots of strands of vanilla icecream with strawberry sauce, with some whipped cream underneath and sprinkled with white chocolate flakes. They were both fantastic, and quite big, I couldn't quite finish my steak, so next time we'll probably share one. But it was worth going to Germany for, and next time we'll probably go for a Pizza Eis, or Lasagne Eis.


After lunch we went for a walk on the beach, by this point the sun was overhead and it was stupidly hot, so we went and hid under the pier for a couple of hours, watching kids playing in the water, seaducks and seagulls splashing around, and boats coming and going, and discussing important matters such as why on earth Dgym didn't spend his teenage years watching Baywatch. When we emerged at about half past three the sun was slightly more bearable so we got on our bikes and headed back over the border for a baking hot fifteen-mile bikeride followed by a nice cool shower.

And just because I'm posting a bunch of pictures, I may as well add one more - this is the sunset over the lake, as viewed from our room.

Wicko

So now there is less of the travelling around, seeing new places and the drama of trying to find accommodation every night, and more about trying to get by in Poland and exploring the area we have landed in. There's some nice cycling to be had around here so hopefully our bikes won't get too cross with us.

We're now in Wicko, where hopefully we will stay a while. Our room overlooks an adjacent lake, which sparkles in the afternoon sun as we laze around on the bed with our laptops, and over which we get to watch the sun set. Beyond the lake is more forest, and it's all rather pretty. At night the frogs sing to us to sleep and when we wake the cuckoos have joined in, unfortunately sometimes the local dogs decide to howl along which is not so conducive to sleep. The weather's been lovely these past few days.

On Wednesday we went on a ride around the Wolin national park to the east of Miedzyzdroje (which is pronounced Meezadroy, or something like that) through some lovely scenic foresty bits, of which there are lots around here. The weather's lovely at the moment, and we had a great time. There's even some hilliness around. Unfortunately, some of the things on the map which looked like roads are not so much roads as tracks, featuring many miles of all our favourite surfaces such as sharp bumpy stones, muddy bits and my all time favourite, dry sand. Various advice on the web tells us that most Polish bikes are mountain bikes - well, now it's clear why.

On Saturday we followed the road down to the tip of our little corner of Wolin Island, through the villages of Wapnica and Lubin. We found plenty of tourist buses, a few cafes, some signs to the beach (which we might follow some other time) and a village shop where we stocked up on supplies. On our return we found a tiny frog hopping around in the garden.

We then spent two solid days sat in our room playing Transport Tycoon.

Rather than using our host's kitchen, they have provided us with a small stove with two hotplates, and two pans. Kinda rules out baking cakes and pies but there's plenty we can do. (We have just realised that we haven't seen very many pies on our travels at all, a most worrying state of affairs). So far we have made spicy vegetable rice (which was very good but surprisingly unfilling), meat & veg stew, a concoction of fried potatoes and scrambled egg with dodgy tinned bacon (which is a little too spongey for comfort), and bangers and mash with some very tasty bangers. I'm quite keen to find a small frying pan so we can get going with the important stuff, i.e. pancakes. The mosquitoes are still eating well, thanks.

Monday June 5th - Nie mowie po polsku

After a three night stay in the cheap bungalow, we left Swinoujscie this morning. About time too, as we seemed to have fallen into a tourist trap for Germans - plenty of tacky market stalls, overpriced waffle vans and obnoxious music. We ate at a fish restaurant yesterday evening evening, not a particularly good meal for us but at least the mosquitoes ate well. We're now in Miedzyzdroje, which we also can't pronounce. It's a little nicer and has some lovely parks. Today we ate our picnic at a chess table in a playground, while watching a bunch of Polish blokes play ping pong. We then went to play on a seesaw, and then took a walk down the beach.

The beaches are beautiful here, quiet clean and relatively empty (at this time of year, at least). Even in Swinoujscie, the seafront is well shielded off from all the touristy rubbish, so you can pretend it doesn't exist once you get down to the sand. Today we saw swans swimming in the sea.

It wasn't hard to find a room here. Coming through town, it was harder to pick out the houses which didn't have rooms to let. We knocked on a couple of doors and managed to get a room for 50zl per night. That's about 9 quid. It's a tiny room and the bed takes up half of it. Our panniers take up half of the other half of it, and there's just enough room for us! We have about 15 quid a day in interest off our combined savings, we could almost do this except that we have no cooking facilities so if we don't want sandwiches for lunch and dinner, we have to eat out and that takes us over budget.

We're looking to rent an apartment in Poland on a 2-3 month lease so we can hopefully keep under budget and spend the summer here - so we popped into an immobilien in Swinoujscie to see if they had anything. The lady said no we don't have anything, but printed out a list of apartments from the town website - unfortunately they all turned out to be holiday rentals at holiday rental prices. There are immobiliens here in Miedzyzdroje but for some reason today they all appeared to be closed, despite their opening hours claiming otherwise. Perhaps we've stumbled over another national holiday and haven't quite realised. We'll try again tomorrow, but we may well end up back in Szczecin trying to sort things out there. Which is no great hardship now that we've found the lovely Brama cafe, and also learned that there is a Dutch pancake restaurant in the city. Mmmm...

Saturday June 3rd - We can't pronounce anything

We're in Swinoujscie, which if I bothered to type it correctly would have lots of accents hanging off it, and if I tried to pronounce it I doubt I'd do very well.

We left Szczecin yesterday, heading in the general direction of coastwards. We decided not to try and make it in a day, and to try stopping at Goleniow. We went through some really beautiful foresty areas on the way to Goleniow - Germany has some nice foresty bits, but Poland even moreso. It's a bit scary on the big roads, but absolutely lovely once you get onto the quiet lanes. We stopped off for a picnic in the middle of nowhere, on what looked like a very freshly-made picnic bench.

Unfortunately, Goleniow didn't want us - there were only two hotels and both were full, probably related to whatever festival type thing was going on in Szczecin. Since there were no campsites around, we carried on to Loznica, which was marked on the map as having a hotel.

Loznica turned out to be a quiet, pretty little village which looked very much like the kind of place that doesn't have a hotel, and the locals seemed to agree with our assessment. We were still nowhere near any campsites, they're all on the coast. We were all for camping rough in a bit of forest except that we didn't have enough water with us, and only bread and cheese for dinner, we hadn't seen any shops for miles and had no idea where the nearest one would be.

What Loznica did have was a train station, with trains going up to the coast. So, knowing nothing of the Polish train system, we thought we'd give it a go. Cheers to the stationmaster for holding up one end of a rather difficult conversation in German, during which we learned which towns we could get trains to, times, prices, platforms, etc, and that it's OK to take our Fahrrads with us, they get tickets too. In Germany we would hope that the person we're speaking to might know a bit of English, but here in Poland, the alternative is so strange to us that we'll happily settle for a bit of German! The train station itself was fantastically old fashioned and full of lots of clunking machines with big levers and dials, which the stationmaster was busily operating during our conversation.

The train pulled up about 45 minutes later and we were faced with a problem that seems common on a lot of European trains - low platforms and high trains. In this respect (and not many more) the UK trains are quite good - there's typically less than a foot in height between the train and platform and it's easy to get bikes on and off. On the Polish train, we were faced with hoisting our fully-laden bikes about 3-4 feet up into crowded carriages. Fun, fun, fun. Fortunately our fellow passengers were a good deal more helpful and accommodating than your average grumpy UK traveller, people moved to make space for us and several helping hands reached down to pull our bikes into the crowded vestibules.

The main part of Swinoujscie is on an island, so after the train journey there was a short ferry trip. We headed up to the hotel area, but before we got there we were distracted by the "Relax" campsite - no, we still didn't use the tent, but rented a bungalow for 66zl per night. There are seesaws just outside, so we're pretty much sorted. We had a peaceful night's sleep last night and it's fairly quiet here apart from the occasional bursts of disturbingly cheesy pop music.

Oh - and check out Rachael and Pete's blog, they're blogging their honeymoon adventures in Central America. Which seems to involve lots of flying through cloud forests, eating ice cream and getting peed on by monkeys.

Friday 2nd June - Szczecin

So, against better judgement, we stayed two nights in the fabulous, luxurious Gryf hotel at the centre of Szczecin. We didn't sleep too badly overall, despite orange light pouring in through the net curtains, and being woken up at one point by our light fitting rattling from people walking around upstairs, I don't think they were walking particularly heavily but the tiniest movement would make the whole place shake.

A visit to the tourist office sorted us out with maps and secured us a room at the Arbet hotel, cheaper at 100zl and looking a little less... well... disgusting. A bit further out of town, but not a problem. This one lived up to its photograph, it's clean, non-rattly and even has curtains (although they're a bit thin) and I wasn't afraid to take a shower. Unfortunately we could only have the room for one night, apparently there's some kind of city celebration happening after that so everywhere's full.

So we walked into town for dinner and ended up at the Brama Jazz Cafe, located under the Royal Gate. If you ever go to Szczecin, this place is well worth a visit. Main meals 15-20zl and absolutely fantastic. I had fettucine with spinach, aubergine and garlic - really tasty and far more than I could manage, although dgym kindly hoovered up the leftovers after his chicken with spinach and gorgonzola sauce, which was also delicious. They have wifi there too, although unfortunately we didn't have our laptops on us.

Tomorrow, we're leaving Szczecin and heading for the coast to see what Poland's like outside of the city.

(PS: We couldn't resist - we have ended up back at the cafe for breakfast, with laptops! :)

Tuesday May 30th - Border

We stayed in Locknitz last night, about 10km from the German/Polish border. We'd been planning to stay in Pasewalk, which was further from the border but a bit bigger - but Pasewalk wouldn't have us, there seemed to be some kind of car show going on and all the hotels were full. So we continued down the road, looking out for accommodation, and for the first time found private accommodation without the help of a tourist office, when we noticed a Zimmer sign outside somebody's house. The owner turned out to be a sweet old lady, who spoke so clearly that we probably would have understood her very well, had we known more German words. We slept very well until 20 to 10 the next morning, and then set off for the border.

This was the fourth border we had cycled across, and all the previous ones had been quite insignificant. France/Belgium had a small sign at the side of the road, you could easily have missed it. Going from Belgium into the Netherlands there was an International Dijk marked, although the point at which we crossed was not very clear at all. Crossing into Germany, again there was no border sign, but it was clear we had crossed over when the cycle path stopped and the road signs changed. Germany/Poland was a different matter. There were signs telling us when it was 3km and 1.5km until the border. On approaching the border, we were told which lanes to get into - and the border itself was marked by buildings (to be expected, Poland's only been in the EU for a couple of years), manned and passport-checked (which we were somewhat more surprised by). Well, they decided to let us in, so we rolled on into yet another new and strange country.

We had no maps of Poland. We still have no maps of Poland, other than a large-scale overview I downloaded the other day. So we decided to head for Szczecin, knowing that it wasn't far away and it's big and should have the resources we need to help us start out in Poland - i.e. a map shop, some currency, and somewhere to stay. Riding into Szczecin, we began to realise it's very big, and it took a long time to get in - not helped by the fact that the roads looked like a crazy place so we were crawling along pavements and/or cycle paths at a snails pace, dodging parked cars, wonky paving stones, etc.

We found ourselves a hotel. The first one we asked at was 120zl. for the night (about 25GBP) so we took it. Unfortunately it's one of those places that (a) has no curtains, and is overlooked by many streetlights (b) has a leaky toilet (c) has the world's creakiest beds and (d) makes you feel a bit grimy, and you know that if you try to take a bath you probably won't come out any cleaner. (How annoying - in our travels we've only stayed in about three rooms that had baths). Places like this aren't too much of a problem if you know you can just move on the next morning, but I'd be a bit miffed if I'd booked a weeks holiday here.

It hasn't rained much today, although it is rather cold. I bet England's getting all the nice weather now, isn't it.

Sunday 28th May - Overtyred

We ended up spending two nights in Waren, for several reasons. (a) to get a bit of coding done. (b) to get a bit of bike maintenance done (c) to avoid any Saturday-related problems in getting a room (d) the place we were staying was reasonably cheap and opposite an Eiscafe.

I picked up a shiny new pair of Schwalbe Marathons from the local bikeshop and fitted them. One day I'll learn to get all my tyre measurements right. Well, I got two out of three right this time, they're a little taller than the old ones, so the rear one only just fits inside the mudguard. However, they are very nice and so far have done everything one would expect a tyre to do. What with dgym still carrying around two of his old trike tyres and me now carrying two more, we spent this morning with nine tyres between us, until we found a skip in which to dispose of them.

While in England, quite a few people asked us how the weather had been on our travels so far. We were able to report that it hadn't been too bad, and that we'd only had one or two days of proper rain. Many of those people remarked on how fortunate we had been. I would just like to point out to all those people that our luck is over, it has rained every day this week (although there have been some sunny intervals) and this afternoon we got absolutely drenched by proper hardcore torrential rain, accompanied by strong gusty winds, which seemed intent on knocking me over sideways. Fortunately by then, we were just coming into Neubrandenburg, our destination for the day, so we stopped at a hotel/restaurant combo. Germany has been good to us in many ways, but the weather is not one of them.

Still, during one of the sunny spells we spotted three gorgeous blondes in a field.



Tomorrow, we're hoping to get fairly close to the Polish border and spend our last night in Germany.

Friday 26th May - Yet more holidays

So apparently yesterday was some kind of holiday. We deduced this from the amount of rain, and also the abundance of people around. There was lots of partying activity by the lake at Schwerin - food tents, music, Germans pushing around wheelbarrows of beer. We also noticed a lot of cyclists around, most of which were sporting sprigs of lilac on their front baskets / handlebars / anywhere they could fit it.

We reached Goldberg around 4 o'clock and encountered lots of beered up young men (presumably they had emptied their wheelbarrows). We followed signs to the tourist office which looked rather closed, and were approached by a cycling couple who asked if they could help us. In our shaky German we managed to establish that today was indeed a Feiertag (holiday), and communicate that we were looking for a room. They indicated to us to follow them, and very kindly led us down the road to a reasonably-priced hotel.

Today was pretty slow as dgym was having lots of trouble with his chain rubbing, I think lots of muck has got into his chain tubes. We've got back into picnics again, a habit which we enjoyed in France but somewhere along the line, pub lunches took over. But when LIDL calls, who are we to ignore it? So we have been picking up lots of tasty bread, ham, pickled herrings, potted salads, chocolate mousse and other goodies and stopping off for pleasant roadside munchies.

Tourist offices aren't always the most useful resource. I visited the one in Waren to find a suitable room. The cheapest they could find me was a pension for 55euro. I decided to go and talk it over with dgym. While we were hanging around in the street umming and ahhing over it, and deciding whether to just go to the nearby campsite, dgym looked over my shoulder and saw a "Zimmer Frei" sign in a cafe window. I went in and asked about it, they didn't seem so keen about a single-night stay but agreed to put us up for 45euro.

Amusing things we saw today:

1. railroad bicycles. I wish I'd got a picture of this. Little railroad trolleys with a cycle attachment on either side, so two people pedal to propel the trolley along the railway, and you can fit a couple more people as passengers. We saw quite a few of these on a stretch of railway, which I am assuming was otherwise disused :)

2. Scavenger ducks at an Eiscafe. I've seen plenty of scavenger cats at cafes, but it was nice to see ducks having a go.

Wednesday 24th May - Touch Wood

I was remarking (some might call it bragging) to Dgym, as he changed his remaining front tyre this morning, that I'd been about 3000 miles on my Schwalbe Marathons without a puncture. I shouldn't have said that. I really, really shouldn't have said that. About 10km down the road, in Ratzeburg, both of us laden with goodies from Aldi and looking for a park in which to picnic, I started to feel a strange bumping sensation from my rear wheel. Looking down, I saw that the tyre was looking unnaturally squishy. Not quite believing it, I jumped off and gave it a quick squidge just to make sure. Deflated indeed... Examination revealed a sharp stone having penetrated the tyre and pierced the tube - and several more which had pierced the tyre and become embedded, but not made it all the way through. The front had similarly embedded stones - I do pick these out from time to time but had got a bit lax about it. I'm considering getting a new pair, given the amount of damage.

The weather's still pretty unpredictable. The terrain has become gently rolling, it's nice to have some gradient again and my bottom definitely appreciates not being stuck in the same position on the saddle all day (a problem I have found with flatness). The landscape is lush and leafy and green and bright yellow, and I saw a hairy little caterpillar crawling across the path today.

Despite the slow start today, we made it to Schwerin, unfortunately the tourist office had just closed when we arrived at 7pm so we found ourselves a hotel. It's a pretty lakeside town, quite big but unbelievably quiet. Wandering to dinner at about 8-9pm, the streets were practically deserted.

Tuesday 23rd May - Back again

So we're back in Germany. Spring has arrived, and it's a good deal greener and leafier than when we left, although the weather is still quite tempramental. Yesterday was rainy when our plane landed, but had its brighter moments later on. Today was one of those days when there's a little rainshower every five minutes so you can't really take your waterproofs off, but also too warm for waterproofs to be comfortable attire. Ah well, at least it's not hailing.

It was lovely to see the bikes again, they had been OK although a little lonely on their own in a storage locker and, like us, they were itching to get going again.

From Stellingen (suburb of Hamburg where we had our storage) we headed into Hamburg for lunch and ice cream, having spent the past three weeks thoroughly missing decent ice cream. (On one occasion I got desperate and ordered lemon icecream at an Italian in Guildford and it was so... English. Too much cream, not enough flavour, and it most definitely didn't zing) We ate our icecream by the lake, which was quite lovely, and then headed out of town, resuming our travels in an eastward kind of direction.

Glinde looked like our kind of place, small towns seem to serve us pretty well. Only when we got there, there was no tourist office and the only hotel with available rooms cost 100euro. Ouch. Fortunately there was an internet cafe around, so we found and booked a room in nearby Bergedorf. Still 80 euros, and still ouch, but it was getting late and we were exhausted from having got up at 4.30am to catch our plane.

The hotel room was OK, pretty small, no bath, hardly 80 euros worth. But at least it was close to restaurants and stuff, including a sushi place. We got a massive two-person tray of sushi to take away, it was really nice, and actually enough to fill us up (it's hard to do that with sushi). Breakfast was nice too, big buffet with lots of different meats, cheeses, salads, breads, etc.

Today we started out pretty late. We both caught various colds, sore throats, coughs etc in England and are still fighting them off, as a result we're not at our best and it was really hard getting up this morning. Dgym even went back to sleep after breakfast. After leaving the hotel, we wandered off to find a bike shop with waterproofs, as Dgym had washed his and lost all its waterproof stuff. We ended up at a huge shop on the edge of town but he didn't find anything he liked except a can of spray-on stuff to re-waterproof your raincoat. It was quite well tested today, and seems to be holding up.

We ate lunch at a bakery/cake shop in Schwarzenbek. Just as we were crossing over to get to the shop, Dgym got a flat from catching a front tyre in a drain which was concealed by a puddle. It was tipping down with rain at this point. The correct course of action in such a situation is to dive into the nearest cake shop and eat cake. Which we did, after eating lunch, in which I had a ham sandwich, and Dgym had two nasty-looking wiener things. Dgym also had a cake which was cherries and quark (soft cheese) on sponge, and was very nice. We then had two Quark Fruchties, which are basically fruit pizza - a sweet base, with quark as the cheese and berries for the topping.

When the rain had cleared up we ventured back outside to fix the flat. Dgym, knowing the trike's original tyres to be a bit weak, had brought back two Armadillo puncture-protected tyres from the UK and so took this as an opportunity to install one of them. It was about to rain again by the time he finished, so he didn't bother with the other, and so currently has three different types of tyre on his trike!

We ended up at Molln for the night. We arrived in town about 6 and raced to the tourist office, suspecting it might be about to close. It turned out to be open until 9pm and they managed to find us a room for 30euro, the cheapest we have had yet (No breakfast, but it's over a bakery so we can't complain). In comparison to last night's hotel, the room is amazing. We've got a private kitchen, shower/toilet and two twin rooms, one of which leads onto a little balcony. Private accommodation here really is excellent value compared to hotels. The only advantage the hotels have is that they're much easier to find. You need a tourist office to find private rooms, unless you're either willing to scour the residential areas of a town for "Zimmer frei" signs, or get on the internet, hope the town website has a listing of such accommodation, and phone around. But the tourist offices, when they're (a) present and (b) open, are usually really helpful.

Monday 22nd May - Back to Hamburg

(by Dgym)

Being back in Hamburg with enough time to sort out the bikes and get a bit of cycling in seemed like a good idea three weeks ago. When waking up at 4:30 a.m. to set off for the airport the problems with this idea really sunk in. Thanks dad for putting us up for our last night in England for quite some time, and for giving us a lift to the airport, sorry about the timing.

We took off into dark rain clouds and landed in dark rain clouds, but in between there was a clear spell during which I saw that we were approaching a coastline and I figured it would probably be the Netherlands and we had probably cycled it. The amazing number of wind turbines confirmed it was the Netherlands indeed, long rows and deep grids of them twinkling in the sun, far more than we had appreciated from the ground. And then I saw the dijke, a thin 20 mile line cutting across the sea, and we had cycled all of it. From there it was possible to make out the first town we came to on the other side (past the steeply angled cycle path through fields of sheep) and the next few big towns we had visited and even stayed at. It was really interesting to see it all again from this very different perspective, days worth of cycling covered in a few minutes, but alas no mexican food this time.

The bikes were safe and sound and still sleeping when we got to them, and we all set off again very soon. Dad had said that there was a nice restaurant area just south of the lake, but that was 35 years ago. We had a look around the area and there were still plenty of restaurants, and we had a very nice (and cheap) lunch there, so thanks for remembering that. The afternoon was spent being simultaniously glad to be back cycling and in a sleep deprivation induced bad mood.

England: crazy place

We were only away for a little over three weeks but it seems like much longer. Now we're back for a bit, England seems like a crazy place. Everybody's in a rush. There's an insane amount of traffic (we were wondering what the occasion was, then remembered every day's like that), the supermarkets are packed out, there's hardly any bicycles around, and everybody drives on the wrong side of the road.

Maps of our travels so far are now on Flickr. Each has a corresponding link to gmap-pedometer, where you can see the route in more detail (although it's a bit vague in a few places, especially in the Netherlands where we were mostly on rural cycle paths and didn't take much note of town names) - I was pleased to see that Google's European mapping has suddenly become very detailed in the past couple of weeks.

And in further fits of geekiness, I've transferred our daily distance/speed stats to an online spreadsheet, where you can view or even mess around with them, and discover such fascinating figures as our total distance of 1149 miles, or average daily distance of 44 miles.

A break

So we reached that point where we had to start thinking about getting ourselves back to the UK for a couple of weeks, as we have weddings to attend, people to see and cute little nieces to babysit. We had originally hoped to be renting a place in Poland by that point, so we could just leave the bikes there and fly back. However, that turned out to be a little optimistic.

Our second crazy idea was to take an unexpected trip to Denmark and sail back from Esbjerg to Harwich with the bikes. However, we were still probably about a week away from Esbjerg, it was a bit more expensive than we wanted, and we decided we didn't really want the detour. I'm sure Denmark's nice, but maybe another time. There used to be a ferry from Cuxhaven to Harwich, which would have been really useful as we were probably less than 100km from Cuxhaven, unfortunately the ferry no longer runs.

We also happened to be close to Hamburg. So we got ourselves onto the internet on Monday evening and looked up self-storage in Hamburg and cheap flights from Hamburg to London. We found what we were looking for, so headed over to the storage place on Tuesday, rented a 1x2m box for 4 weeks and put away the bikes and most of our panniers. We got a taxi to the airport and went over to the germanwings counter to buy our tickets. Turned out to be about 40euro more than we'd seen online so we got onto the airport wifi (at a cost of 5euro), bought them online and at checkin showed them the booking confirmation on my laptop screen. Nicely done!

So we flew back to the UK (which is pleasantly warm at the moment), and the travels will resume in about three weeks. I think our legs will appreciate the break, although we've both been having a fantastic time and as far as I'm concerned, my legs can complain all they want but they've got a lot more pedalling ahead of them, whether they like it or not!

PS: The mittens picture, as promised. (To be fair, I look equally silly in my waterproof kit.)