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.