Biking Lower Saxony

Ostrittrum, Osenberg, Barneführerholz, Huntlosen.  Then there was the Jagthütte and the Püttenhütte and the various Schlagbaume.  OMG.  German is hard to get your tongue around.

And as you all know, directions are hard to follow. For us.

Today, Good Friday, is a federal holiday.  Stores closed.  Commercial traffic - nil.  It's a quiet day and folks go out and do family things.  For us, it means a little bike trip.  We spent the better part of an hour last night looking at this trip.  It meant putting the bikes on the car and driving to our starting point.  We used to do that sort of thing pretty often, taking the bikes somewhere to do a trip, but I think it's been a year and more since that last sort of trip.  Lately, it's been train and bike.

But, good.  The car needed some exercise (!) and getting to the starting point by train was too complicated.  Off to Ostrittrum.

We only made two wrong turns getting there. But, folks, this place is in the middle of nirgendwo! But we found it, parked the car and downloaded the bikes.

I've said it multiple times but I'll go ahead and repeat myself - you just don't have to go far to be in a very different place here in Germany/Europe.  This area of course looks familiar, but still, there's a local flavor that is not Vegesack.

We start at the old watermill in  Ostrittrum, near the little zoo that is a magnet for families with young children!  (We are not not not going there.)   The mill is old, but of course, lots of things are old here.  Including us.

It's the same and it's different, the landscape here.  In the countryside it looks so clean - no graffiti, no trash along the roadside, and the yards are so ---- done!

But we're not about yards, but the woods and such. The tour leads us through some old forest paths.

We had a hard time following the map (who is surprised about that!) so we had to make frequent stops to check our way.  But finally, I had to eat.  (I get cranky when I'm hungry.)  So we stopped at the little hunting lodge.

It was built in the 19th c for local royalty, restored about 20 years ago, and still a place to stop and rest.  We had our lunch there.

Hey!  It was tasty, and enough - sandwich, boiled egg, salad, and of course a bit of bubbly.  Besides, we got to gaze at the oldest Douglas Fir in all of Europe.  Really.

Sorry the picture is not better, but the big guy with the big trunk was grown from a seed that came from the US over 160 years ago.  Only three of these originals remain here in Germany, and this one is the oldest.

There were many views of the River Hunte

And even a view of the bed of the river before it was diverted!! How weird.

At this point I was getting a bit tired, and our map-reading was getting a bit weak.  We had to take a couple of backwards trips and had to ask a few folks exactly where we were going, but we finally got there.

Along the way there were lots of fields of raw bread.  Or raw schnapps.  Who knows what will become of the acres and acres and acres of wheat!

And fields of what will become canola oil.  They're not quite in full bloom, but the yellow is so so yellow.  Is there something more yellow?

The paths were so varied - single lane in the woods, double lanes in the woods, asphalt, brick.  It was always interesting.  But you can keep the sandy paths.

After another (another! really?) wrong turn, we made it back to the car, the starting point, the beginning and the end of our day trip.  It was only 38K but 4 hours (hey, there were head winds and hills and stops and a nap!).  But such a lovely day.  I'm often reminded of an old song from Jim Croce - Time in a Bottle.  I call these Bottle Days.

Here's a video.  Have fun.