Gratitude

One Thing I planned to do for some time now and is a bit overdue by now. Here is to prayers:

Danke

Dziękuję barzo

Dakujem vám

Köszönöm

Hvala lepa

Puno hvala

Hvala Vam

Faleminderit shumë

Blagodaram

Mnogo blagodarya

Efharisto poli

Çok teşekkür ederim

... to the lands and its peoples. I had the privilege to see the best of you.

Day 6: Mescherin-Szczecin

I had it all.
At midnight the idyllic camping was hit by a thunderstorm. Ouuu yea, that was really cosy. The lightnings as bright as daylight. At some point I needed going outside to tension the outer hull, because I did not use though cords and contact between inner and outer layer resulted in waterdrops falling on my had.
Never the less, after the storm was over I continued sleeping like a baby and I had an early super motivated start in the day.
15 km later heavy rain started falling again. Another couple of km, I crossed the polish boarder. Yet another couple of km I lost the oder-neisse-radweg and ended up on a main road, of which I got tired soon. Then out of luck I found a bike path again but soon the road became quite tricky and it appeared that parts of the track were still under construction. Later real off road feeling came up. So I fought my way through to Sczcecin on rather touring bike unfriendly roads. After I took care of the money and provisions, I tried to find some help for touring at the tourist information and soon realized this will take up the rest of the day. Freestyle route planing in poland is nothing for beginners like me.
After some research I will pass one fighting my way through to the baltic sea and take the ship (1pm hour) to Swinoujscie instead. There I'll try the europe trail R10.

Day 5: Gross Neuendorf-Mescherin

It was all there, sunshine, the beautiful landscape of the natural reserve and beautiful tracks. The colours in the early autumn light were just amazing. I saw egrets and snakes, the whole reserve was packed with animals. Finally I found an idyllic camping with a balkan at the oder.

There was a small commotion one the road when I came around a corner. A women saw me a bit late (still 20 m) and started a weird manoeuvre that ended in an amazing stunt. I halted and her bike flew almost in my hands. She got up and took her bike. Her husband was apologizing while I was asking if she is alright. She luckily was. End of commotion.

Day 4: Helensee, Gross Neuendorf

The dialect has changed now, I like it.

And here are two funny things:

1) inc Frankfurt a.d.O I was looking for a tobacco shop and I could not find one nowhere, so I asked. The guy was looking startled. "maybe you want to try the other side of the bridge", he then suggested. And there right across the bridge I saw the first 24-hour-cheap-cigarette store in my life (only cigarettes) next to another half a dozen.

2) just when I thought that this day had it's own landscape theme, as so happened the previous two das to have, I got to a dyke just like the ones yesterday. Only when I checked the compass and the direction of the river flow I was certain not to ch cycle back where I came from. Later I realized that there were a lot of other indicators against that, but in this moment the resemblence seemed quite strong. Maybe I was going took fast to take in enough details to make the difference.

Now the deers are "chanting" their love songs for a lullaby ;-)

Day 3: Koebeln-Helensee

Jep irony had its way. It was raining indeed, but luckily only for and hour or so.

While pedaling I couldn't help noticing the number of bridge ruins and other bridges that have no bit missing, but that were rosty. I then wondered if this reflects on German-Polnish relationships.

Another thing that I enjoyed and left a deep impression, were the bycicle tracks on top of the dykes. From there I had a great view, since it was sometimes the highest point for kilometers, even more so after Neissenmünde, where the rather small river, Neisse, joins the major river Oder. There the dykes are maybe twice as high as before and the water masses are impressive.

After my wrists would hurt again and again, I decided to by some handles that can be mounted at both ends of the handlebar. In Guben I found a shop in the backyard of a house. The owner had lived for quite some years already and seemed to have climbed out of his glass cabinet where he kept some spare parts form before "der Wende" as he himself refered to the DDR times. He told me that nowadays nobody asks for these anymore. An original! Can't help but to love these people. To complete the picture he was asking for one Mark pice when I settled the bill.

Since my ambitions to make 110+ km without the wind in the back had my cycling into the eavening and I wanted to set up the tent by daylight, I resolved for googlemaps to quickly find the nearest camping. I ended up in some side road, where I already wondered why there were no signs one the main road of the village. I went never the less since I was curious to see what google possibly could have found there that has a connection to the searchword. Well, there was a garage that advertised, some accessoirs for RVs. Then I tried again with osmand, with more succsess. I managed to put up my tent in time facing the beatiful lake. And here I am, on that beautiful camping with 3 kebab shops, one supermarket and an asia fast food thingy (all deserted, because main season is luckily over)

Day 2: Goerliz-Koebeln

Since it was supposed to rain all day I decided to buy some bikers underwear, that I deeply regretted yesterday eavening not to have packed before takeoff. Well that peace of cloth certainly and literary saved my buttom today. Probably Ivan was right when he said, that certain leather seats dort not get formed by the cyclists behind, it's the other way around.
Funny was also thato I did not catch a drop of rain in the end. Hopefully irony does not proof the weather forecast for tomorrow wrong.
North of the Lausitz it isch rather flat, but the wind compensates for the absent altitude differences, especially if your one an open plane. I was lucky not to head west. The Neissen-Oder trail follows, as the name sais, a river, so I had the wind from almost all directions, mostly from my right side.
I also took a wrong turn in at the beginnig and found myself in Poland faster thanks I realized. The hit that I crossed the border was the strikingly different environment. On the O-N trail on the German side, comming from Görlitz center there it felt like Disneyland for retired people, and on the other side was... Well I have to take another look before I can dicribe it properly. It somehow reminded me of certain villages in the countryside of France.

The catch does not seem unwilling to remain seated, its plastik gives in and I keep taping it. Maybe there will be something like a gallery for broken figure heads...

Day 1: Dresden-Goerlitz

The west wind blew merci and 110 + km east today. It wasn't without any effort of myself though, myself legs are heavy and ich i will sleep tight tonight.
Tomorrow i'll start heading north for the next couple oft days.
The cat was waving and some people were wondering what this head figuren is for. When another cyclist was asking i replied; “this isch myself navigation device, the cat isch waving me in the right direction.“ and since ich haven't and strict route, the cat seemed to be right sonst far.

B.t.w. The map was updated, but you need toll zoom to get to the tracks.

ways to go

After doing my best in bringing the work to a closure
After putting my house hold into boxes
After a lot of administrative stuff
After a long journey to to the place I grew up (with the boxes)
After stashing the boxes
After a long joyful couple of days with my familiy in the garden of my fathers house
After fiddeling the last bits and pieces on my bike
After packing, unpacking and re-packing my travelling equipement

...I'm finally taking off.

When I followed the advice of my dear sister to put something very personal on my bike I had this funny moment of realization.
So I chose a happy-friend-lucky-whatever-cat as a figurehead to be mouted at the front of my bike. You know, one of these waving cats you can usually have in gold or white in every second asiatic grocry store or kiosk. I first noticed them the movie sans soleil from cris maker, where he's filming the temple of the cats in Japan. Funny little things...I got my luckey cat only recently in Madrid. So this cat has come some way already, knows about travellling an will hopefully wave me though towards the right direction.- ahead, ahad, ahead, straight ahead.... Anyway, so I prepared most of the things I could think of and found useful, which turned out to be quit time consuming. Among those preparations was thinking about appropriate cloths, what tools to take, what spare parts to take, -and then get the stuff, collecting numbers and addresses of persons to send post cards to or to be consulted in a urgency, etc.
The final preparation was then to put that lukey-cat on my bike and I realized that this is one of the few certain things on my journey; there will be a white paw waving luckey cat sitting above my front wheel. that's how far certainty goes concerning personal prognosis!

Prolog

During my preparations I came across many questions, starting from basic equipment to navigation and
also wether to write a blog or not. Certainly I wanted to document with a small notebook, but the modern media stuff? Sometimes I thought, that I could spear the world with yet another travelling blog, then I was thinking it to be nice for my family and now I'm writing the thing in english. But that still left the question about the pictures. Do I need a camera? Yet another thing to haulage around...
But then I came across this:

"Das heutige Bildmedium ist ein Transparenzmedium. Es lässt keinen Tiefsinn mehr zu. Augustinus schrieb einmal: Je mehr die Sprache durch die figürliche Ausdrucksweise verdeckt werde, umso süsser munde sie, wenn der figürliche Mantel einmal geöffnet und das dahinterliegende Geheimnis erblickt werde.(...)"
Byung-Chul Han

"The modern visual medium is a transparent medium. It does not allow for a
deeper meaning. As Augustinus once said: the more language is hidden
behind figurative expressions, the sweeter the revelation when the
underlying secret is uncovered.(...)"
Translation by Johannes (Thank you very much)

(Can't, won't translate, sorry)
Funny the things you can find in a economy magazine... And there is also this fairly familiar guy:

"I have no clue of how to shoot proper pictures"
Felix

... well these things above and my deep desire to express myself (an individualistic person with innovating and bright ideas), brought me to write this travel blog with mostly words.