Cycle touring the Ostsee

Well, we have just finished a glorious week of cycle touring. Last Sunday, we took the train back to Lübeck (about 45 minutes north of Hamburg) to begin our tour. Lübeck is a gorgeous little chocolate-box town and the buildings in the old part of the city have UNESCO heritage listing. Apparently Lübeck is also famous for its marzipan confectionary, but we didn’t manage to find the shop in our afternoon wandering- I am hoping to try again when we pass back through :)

From Lübeck, we set off on the first, and also the longest day of our trip- to Wismar. I’ll say at the outset that this trip was certainly at a ‘cruising’ pace, and we thoroughly enjoyed stopping off lots and seeing the sights… I’ve made a Googlemap with our journey on it, so you can check out where we went.

We were a bit nervous about our trip, as we knew that we would not have bike helmets. As it turned out, probably less that 10% of our trip was on the road. Generally, we biked on either radweg (cycleways) beside road or completely dedicated cycle roads. We have been constantly stunned by both the provision of cycleways and the number of people using them; throughout our whole tour, we have seen a constant stream of people riding. Our trip took us through a mixture of landscapes- from beach fronts to farm land to forests. We have loved the varied landscape and the chance to see some more of the German landscape.

Fortunately for us, the weather has been perfect for the whole week and, consequently, we are both brown as berries from spending all day out in the day. The only fly in our cycling ointment has been the prevailing easterly wind (we have been biking west to east) which has been with us all week. Still, we have had blue skies every day and lots of opportunity to laze around in the sun.

We’re now in Stralsund- having finished our 6th day of cycling. We’re spending tomorrow and Monday here, and are then back to Lübeck for a night before heading to London for the rest of the week. While we are here, we’re hoping to go over to Rügan Island. The whole region we are in at the moment was part of the old East Germany and we told that Rügan was a well-known holiday spot for the communists and, before them, the Nazis.