2nd day - Crossing Mecklenburg

Few sounds warm my heart as much as the light drumming of rain on the outside of a tent – imagine the humming of water boiling on a camping stove joining this! We are safe and snug in our tent and sleeping bags, my toes are slowly thawing, the beautiful Bullitt and the brave little Birdy are sleeping under a tarpaulin, and instant noodles are on the boil.

We are also battered and weary, and we are a long long way from Berlin, which would have been our destination for today. We spent our way grinding through the hills on a highway, with tractors and trucks overtaking us one by one. I am sure several of them were with us on the ferry to Rostock, caught us up in the morning, went to their destination, passed us on the way back, and again on the way out. I observed football grafitti is abundant all around Rostock: someone who loves Hanse Rostock has painted all the transformator buildings and many embankment walls, just to be sure. Never mind the trucks, but I was sick of Hanse Rostock by the time we left the highway.

We filled our bottles at a petrol station, then we took a turn from the main road along the Remplin lakes. The sound of a million geese filled the air, the landscape was really cozy, but we were at the end of our energies.

So we decided to take a turn off the road, roll out our sleeping bags and take a siesta. Nice plan, but most of the fields were flooded. We finally found a spot on top of an embankment, I put in my earplugs and fell asleep despite the noisy birds. We were woken about an hour later by a guy who wanted to know if we were injured. Turns out the bikes tipped over, and the whole thing looked a bit like the scene of an accident. We had just enough time to pack before dusk, and set off again.

The Mecklenburg Lake District was formed by glaciers, and glaciers are messy. They don’t sort sediment acording to weight like rivers do, they just mix sand, gravel and boulders and shift it around. They also don’t always form clear drainage networks, but build totally irregular moraine hills, which are then also sculpted by the wind. So this part of the world is beautiful but rather challenging to cycle. There is a network of cycling routes, but it is not clearly marked or mapped whether these are paved, cobbled, gravem or muddy sand. We ended up having to turn back due to muddy conditions, with the derailleur of the cargo bike getting terribly sandy in a deep puddle. This region is sparsely populated, we rode for hours without meeting a single person or car. Sometimes the villages were so far there was no light anywhere on the horizon. Piles of erratic boulders have been collected at farm plot corners since centuries, and road junctions are marked by massive ancient oak trees. So it felt lonely and weird to roll through these hills so different from home, the sleeping villages and the endless farmland. Around 11 o’clock, we decided to camp for the night, and when we finished packing everything into the tent, it started to rain.