Today’s pictures on flickr

What a beautiful day for cycling! It seemed a little bit gray when we woke up this morning, but that was just the morning fog.

It was kind of disappointing. The plan was to cycle about 30km down the canal to Brunsbuttel, and then take the 4pm ferry to Cuxhaven. The ferry would take a couple of hours, so we’d just have enough time before dark to find and set up camp. 30km seemed a waste of such a beautiful day.

We jinxed ourselves. For some reason, the ferry wasn’t running today, not until Thursday. This meant a 30 km detour to the Gluckstadt ferry, probably 80km extra overall.

As we were leaving camp, I broke my kickstand. My own fault really, I was “adjusting” my bicycle with my bootheel. It did tighten up my steering, but the kickstand was the casualty. So we had a few errands in town: a kickstand, a repair to Bethany’s rear rack, I had a slow leak in my rear tire, and we had stuff to post, stuff from Denmark we didn’t want to leave, but didn’t want to lug around. On its third use, my new kickstand snapped, so it appears we’ve started a new kickstand saga.

I noticed both Holstein and Hereford Pilsners advertised in Brunsbuttel. I wonder which tastes better. Perhaps the Hereford is meatier?!

We followed the Elbe down to Gluckstadt and caught the 6pm ferry there. We cycled between the dike and the river, sheep were on the dike the whole way. Sometimes they were on the cycle path too, we could have annoyed some farmers by leaving a gate open.

After crossing the river and picking up supplies at the grocery store, we were again faced with the annoying task of finding our campsite in the dark.

But we did, and they had a pub there, so all was well.