Sunday 18 August 2013

Saturday 17 August. Bertingen to Grieben.

We stayed last night at the Hotel La Porte, just outside Bertingen, in a room that what was effectively a small holiday cottage. It was fully fitted with mosquito screens on the windows.

We had an excellent breakfast this morning and by 9:10 we we on the way through the forest to Bertingen, about a kilometer away. It was nice and shady under the trees. It became overcast as we made our way through the small  villages of Kehnert and Sandfurth. This made for easy walking.

The first few photographs will give you an idea of the vast flood plane of the Elbe on which we are walking. One does wonder if some of the deichs/stop banks may make the floods deeper by confining the Elbe into a narrower channel than it would choose itself. Might it not be preferable, in some locations, to flood greater areas but at a shallower depth?

The large boulder, with the map at Sandfurth (see photo), is one of the few places where the actual source of the Elbe/Labe has been mentioned. Normaly on the Elberadweg people talk about Prague as the start, but although a fine city Prague stands on the Vltava, not the Labe.

A couple on bicycles stopped us and started asking about our walk, in German. Where were we going to, where had we started etc. Then they asked where we came from. It was only when I said New Zealand that the woman started speaking English, with a marked American accent. Apparently they came from New York! They were quite surprised we'd walked from Dresden this year.

We then headed for Ringfurth where we managed to get a bier garden to open for us. A convenient spot but painfully slow, if pleasant, service. They were preparing for a wedding reception and I think that may explain the delay.

Shortly after we stopped a couple of cyclists turned up heading for Magdeburg. They had been seated only a few minutes when his wife started laughing and got up to wipe his collar. A swallow had managed to poop on him.

Shortly after we left the pub and crossed the road to powder our feet. Whilst there Shiel saw the massive storks nest up behind the pub. I went and pointed it out to the couple suggesting the chap was lucky it was a swallow and not a stork that pooped on him! They got the joke.

As we walked on the sky cleared and it became a little too hot for comfortable walking. We passed a group of horses down by the Elbe and I managed to get one to respond to my call. You can see him on the right of the photograph with the Elbe in the background.

Today after thousands of miles of road walking I passed my first sock and it looked to be a walker's sock to boot. :) Industrial gloves are quite common but more so in the UK and the CR.

We arrived in Grieben just before 3pm passing the old style windmill at the south of town. Old windmills are comparatively rare but the modern wind turbines are very common in Germany, as are solar panels. You get lots of old farm buildings with their rooves covered in solar panels.

By and large most Germans tend to have very neat and tidy gardens. What I really like though are the eccentric gardens, with all the garden animals, like  the one shown in the last photograph.

Today's walk was 20.2km in 5.75 hours. What is really surprising though is that we didn't loose the trak.

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