Day 5: Scheeßel to Engehausen – 67.4k, 174m climbed

Several people have asked why I’ve chosen to camp. Trust me, as I was shivering in my inadequate sleeping bag at midnight, while rain pattered in the canvas, I was asking myself the same thing. I shall be investing in higher tog kit when I get home. But to answer the question – I’m doing it for a mix of challenge, economy, and necessity (some places on my route didn’t have other accommodation). I’m just hoping for fine weather for my future camping nights – my personal gazebo last night was a godsend.

And for anyone still wondering why I do these rides, that’s easy: it just makes me happy. That’s what I was feeling as I pedalled along this lovely quiet road this morning:

And this fork in the road almost gave me goosebumps, conjuring as it did Robert Frost’s famous lines from The Road Not Taken:

‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And I took the one less travelled by, and that made all the difference’

As if to reward my mindful appreciation, just after I took this picture I was treated to a tree-top-high flypast of three fat-bellied military transport aircraft:

But despite the warnings, I didn’t see any low-flying storks:

I’m not always in a state of zen-like calm though. Riding through dense woods, it did occur to me to wonder whether they still have bears in Germany. I told myself I was being ridiculous until I saw this sign complaining of rising numbers of wolves, and their impact on livestock:

Speaking of livestock farming, in the last few days I’ve noticed quite a lot of calves in veal crates, which I thought had been banned (perhaps the tiny bit of outside space they were given got round a ban?). But I was pleased that livestock farmers in this area seem to have a more humane approach to animal welfare. This sign says that the animals live in family groups and that calves stay with their mothers for around 8 months:

For the most part though, I was riding through arable farming country again. New crops today included maize, and something that looked like spinach but may have been cattle food. And in the farm shops (word of the day: Hofladen) it was the turn of new potatoes:

In the circumstances it was very poor planning on my part to miss the Farmyards Open Day tomorrow – clearly a highlight of the local calendar:

Architectural highlights included (a) this lovely old barn, bearing the inscription above the door: ‘Dat Ole ehrn, dat Neie löhrn, dat Gaue mehrn, dat Slimme wehrn’, which seemed to confound Google Translate, so I called in the premium service (aka Nikki). She thought it might be the ‘notoriously difficult’ Plattdeutsch but suggested it might mean: ‘Honour the old, learn the new, more haste, less sin’. Hard to argue with any of that.

And (b) this beautiful old mill (nb, the top part is thatched!) in the small town of Brockel and beside a cycle path aptly named the Niedersäsischer Mühlerstraße.

Side-note: as the young people say, ‘I was today years old’ when I realised that that first word is what we call Lower Saxony. Once you realise that ‘nieder’ equates to nether (ergo lower), and say sächsischer as though you’ve drunk a bit too much schnapps, it all makes sense. Oh, and a mühl is a mill:

I’d noticed a conspicuously straight stretch on today’s route, and as I’d suspected it turned out to be an old railway line, re-purposed for bikes and re-surfaced in glassy-smooth concrete. Have I mentioned how good the cycling infrastructure is here? This is the former station at Bretel, complete with platform:

My guardian angels of the day appeared a bit further along, in the form of a couple of cyclists my age who explained why a man in hi-viz had blocked our way just before a junction with a road. Apparently a car rally was going past later. We could go through, but not come back (kein Problem!). Somewhat unnecessarily, hi-viz man added (he did speak English after all) ‘because the cars drive very fast. They can’t stop for bikes’. Some of the cars caught me up later, just as I was taking a picture of another detached church spire (I’m a bit obsessed with them now). I particularly liked this old Ford Cortina:

My route passed through Walsrode. It’s a pretty nondescript little place, and I wouldn’t have given it a second glance had I not noticed in my pre-reading that Bergen Belsen, where 50,000 Jews (including Anne Frank) died in WW2, was located just a few kilometres away. It’s impossible to imagine how anyone could have taken part in such atrocities, let alone the grandparents or great grandparents of the kind and decent people I’ve been interacting with here.

I had a lovely couple of ‘conversations’ with people in Visselhövede (see rally car and detached spire, above). In both cases, they mostly asked questions in German, along the lines of: Where are you from? Where are you going? How long will it take? I mostly answered in English. The man gave a double thumbs up and said, ‘Toll! (Great!) Gute Tour!’ The woman looked horrified/amazed/impressed and slapped me on the arm by way of encouragement (or I think that’s what it was). Who knew that the trick to interacting with the locals was to eat a falafel salad in a supermarket carpark?

One of the perils of touring where you don’t speak the language is that you don’t understand the warning signs until you look them up later. Luckily, the surface was not slippery today: