Monday dawns as beautifully as Sunday had. It’s sunny and already warm so I’m pleased I woke early and didn’t book breakfast at this hotel. I want to get on the road and get some miles behind me so I leave and pack up the bike that is fortunately where I left it. With no desire to have to engage with Monsieur Grumpy I just ride out of the car park through the gaps in the railings that I could have entered by if I had thought about it a bit more. Maybe I’ll get a fine in the post, lets worry about that later (I don’t).
— Just starting? View Day 1 post of the roadtrip —
I leave Turnhout just as the rush hour is beginning and I watch the good people of the town walk and cycle in to their places of work. It’s nice to see, it feels very European and it gets the day off to a nice start. Soon I’m on the motorway and making tracks for the Dutch border. Entering the Netherlands is as exciting as Belgium the day before. I feel like Ewan McGregor, Itchy Boots or John Fremont. The Netherlands soon turns into Germany, I’m in my third country of the day and I haven’t even had breakfast yet. So I stop for breakfast, what I thought was a ham roll but turns out to be a panini and is put under a grill. The nice lady behind the counter can’t believe I don’t want coffee and gives me a smiling ‘huff’.
A fairly uneventful day sees me head north east towards my destination of Wismar.
I stop for another sandwich and a drink and the Polizei give me the once over as they glide past in their van. The police seem to be in attendance at every rest area which quickly becomes reassuring as I don’t need to lock everything up when I stop. They don’t seem to do anything about the robbery that occurs inside the petrol stations, 90c to use the toilet? I discover that toilets are free at the rest areas without shops and fuel but they’re rather grim places to go about your business, especially in this heat.
It’s an unremarkable journey, the only think worthy of mention is perhaps the longest traffic jam I’ve ever seen. Approaching Duisburg from the east there’s a line of trucks at least 20km long. I make a mental note of this for the way back, I’ve not yet learned that long queues of trucks don’t mean long queues for the rest of us. The trucks pull over into the right hand lane and everyone else appears to carry on as normal.
I’m close to Hamburg when I stop to stretch my legs and use the toilet. A free one at a non-retail rest area. I’m having a drink and contemplating getting back on the bike when a small, fluffy white dog comes bounding up to me. I’m sitting on the kerb so when he comes to sniff my boots I can see he has a lead training behind him. I pick up the lead because I don’t want this dog to be injured by any of the cars or trucks moving around and before I even have time to wonder what to do next a young girl comes racing up out of breath and clearly a bit distressed. The dog seems to know her, she seems to know the dog and she looks so relieved to have it back that it’s clearly hers so I give her the lead.
She thanks me in German, I understand that, she says something else which I gather to be she dropped the lead and the dog ran off and she gives me a rock and runs back to her family.
Her father waves to me, I wave back. The rock has a cartoon chicken painted on it. I shout Danke but she doesn’t hear me. I put this rock in my bag, I like it.
Just look at my new rock!
I arrive in Wismar tired, happy and feeling not only like Ewan McGregor, Itchy Boots and John Fremont but also like Lassie having saved the day for that girl. Wismar is really pretty, but it’s not easy to negotiate when you’re tired and unfamiliar with the town. After amusing the locals with multiple drive by passes I decide to walk to find the hotel. Check in done, bike parked in the garage I rode past 3 times without noticing the big purple sign I head up to my comically tiny room. This is the most expensive hotel I will stay in on this leg of the trip and it’s the most disappointing, but it’s not terrible. Just very small and my window is one storey above some karaoke. No-one sings 99 Luftballons, which is a shame. But the headboard of my bed is a lightbox with a picture of an old rowing boat on a white sandy beach. It’s unexpected, weird and also rather nice.
What this hotel lacks in space it makes up for with it’s location. I’m right by the old harbour and on the edge of the old town. There’s a brewery tap on the corner so I decide to have a beer and a burger. Yesterday’s failure to interact with people isn’t in my mind as I sit down and a young man approaches and says something in German. I ask him if he can speak English, I can do it when I don’t have time to overthink it, he says yes. This was a little overoptimistic but we get by, I decide whilst looking through the menu that his English is fine and it’s me that’s the problem. I have a go at ordering my meal in German but he looks at me like I’ve arrived from another universe, not another country so I decide not to do that again. I also decide I earned two beers, so I have another.
Then I go for a walk around Wismar. I wanted to come here as the town is part of the ‘empire’ that ended up constructing much of Tallinn’s old town and you can tell.
Wismar like a slightly smaller scale Tallinn which makes sense as the Hanseatics were richer and more developed by the time they started work on their northeastern outpost. It’s a lovely, quiet town even though it’s very touristy.
I like it so I wander it’s streets until it’s time for bed.
Total distance 390 miles, riding time 7 hours 14 minutes.
