Today’s pictures on flickr

Beautiful day for cycling today. We woke up to bright blue skies, and a wind out of the east. Our direction of travel was south-west, so that suited us just fine!

The plan today was to head cross-country to Bremerhaven. There were no geographical features to follow, so we knew we’d get lost a few times today. We did, and it was frustrating, but I don’t think we did any worse than we expected to do.

About 10 kilometres into the trip I got another flat on my rear tire. This is certainly getting frustrating by now! Hopefully I can find a shop in Amsterdam or somewhere earlier that has a tire in my size (20 x 1 3/8) that is a proper touring tire and not a kid’s tire with a max inflation of 40 psi!

Today I sacrificed one of my spare tubes to line the tire. Cross your fingers; this should protect me much better from flats in the future.

One highlight of the trip was Osten. This is a beautiful old town on the banks of the Oste river. There we crossed the river using an old “travelling bridge”. We lucked out; there’s a freeway bridge a kilometre or so away, so the travelling bridge runs infrequently for tourists. We were the only ones actually using it to cross the river; everybody else made the round trip.

A travelling bridge is basically a very tall bridge with something like a gondola car hanging down from it. So you then end up crossing the river much like a cable ferry.

Bethany picked a route today trying to stick to areas with extensive irrigation ditches, rightly figuring that those would be the flattest areas. And flat they were; people call Saskatchewan flat, but this seemed flatter.

On top of pretty much our only hill today, somebody flipped the signs on us. Luckily we were suspicious and checked our map closely. If we would have had to do that hill twice, we would have been very annoyed!

The air was very fragrant today. There were lots of dairy farmers out spreading liquid manure. As dad would say, they were “spreading Avon”,

Lots of acorns falling this time of year. A couple of days ago we had a few hit our tent during the night, but today Bethany put her helmet to it’s first test: it successfully fended off an attack by a falling acorn. I wasn’t quite as lucky; I got nailed in the quads by one.

We actually put our tent up in the daylight tonight. Credit the tailwind, I guess, because even with our mishaps we did good time. We probably won’t be doing as many kilometres tomorrow; we have to go in to Bremerhaven to get new maps. We also have to upload some new blog entries; I think you guys are dry!

Comments

  • Neil, Iona & Kara on 18 Oct 20:34

    Bethany & Bryan: We are so glad to be a part of this - you two have certainly had your time of it (what an adventure!!). Neil is in ONT rite now & will catch up,upon his return. Keep on keepin' on and please stay safe. Look forward to more updates. Luv ya Iona & Kara

  • Claudia on 19 Oct 13:16

    Nice! the idea of a travelling brigde is so awesome! What's the temperature there? doens't look at all like chilly Ottawa And.... flatter than Saskatchewan, eh? didn't think that was possible ;-)