Spring Time Biking

After all the moaning last weekend I want to please you now by showing some photos of my bicycle tour in Northern Germany. Together with 4 former colleagues - all of them early retired like myself - we stayed in a hotel in Lüneburg, a small medieval town on the river Ilmenau, close to the main river Elbe.

Lüneburg Town Hall

The town's main place dotted with ice cream parlours

The former harbour down by the river Ilmenau now is the place for summer evenings

A fine illuminated example of the typical gables alongside the medieval streets

Photo above: Biking on the dykes of the river Elbe. To the right you can still see the remains of the floods which had been exceptionally high a few weeks ago. To the left countless sandbags are lying to stabilise the dyke.

The road to the ferry was still flooded and the ferry had to use an emergency quay. Two weeks ago the little cottage, seen in the background, had completely disappeared with the water level up to its roof.

The Elbe plains are a nature reserve and lots of birds are to be seen. A sign told that the local stork had 3 chicks last year. Now it was again restoring its nest. We also spotted lapwings, different species of geese, swans and yellowhammers.

We had 3 days of biking around Lüneburg and managed a daily distance of around 60 miles. At a leisurely pace I have to admit. On the final evening we visited the local saline bath. Maybe the 90 minutes of bathing were a bit too much as I found it more exhausting than all the biking.