Hameln, Ritiln, Osnabruck, Ambergen, to Holland border

June 20-23

The weather in Hameln had been great. It was really sunny, some of the first sun we'd had since Poland. So we were thinking that summer was back. We were dead wrong. That day out of Hameln, the weather morphed from sun to clouds to downright downpour.

After about 30kms along a bike path, we rolled into a beautiful old town called Ritiln. It was still dry when we arrived, but the rain clouds were gathering. We were feeling pretty wimpy, and we had to send some emails back to the U.S., so we decided to get a hotel. We aimed for one that we had seen advertised on the path. The hotel made a big point of saying that it could store bikes for bike tourists.

Eric went in and checked out the room. It was great--but for some reason, it didn't have a phone line that would allow us to hook up the Newton. Eric checked out another room, which had a fax port, so we rented that instead. The guys at the front desk of the hotel had no clue whether the fax port would work with our computer. But by then, we just wanted to stay dry, so we took it anyway. It turns out we couldn't get the Newton working from the fax port. The problem was a fuzzy phone line. Of all the places in the world, I never thought I'd be stymied by a fuzzy phone line in West Germany.

The next day, we decided to make a lot of distance, because we wanted to get to Utrecht, Holland, in time for our friends' wedding. We met MaartenJan and Karin in New Zealand in October of 1997, and over email, they had invited us to their wedding, set for July of 99! When we got the emailed invitation, we were in Spain, trying to decide when to end the trip. That invitation settled things. We decided we'd end the trip right after the wedding, and fly home from Amsterdam. In the meantime, we'd zigzag all over Europe on our bikes, ending in Holland.

Well, if you read the previous chapters, you know that from Spain, we rode west and south (away from Holland). Then we flew to Budapest, and rode east (away from Holland), and then north (still not towards Holland). As a matter of fact, we didn't actually start riding towards Holland until somewhere in the Czech Republic.

Anyway, by the time we reached western Germany, we were getting really anxious to get to Holland. All along our route, we had emailed MaartenJan and Karin to say we were in Budapest, we were in Kosice, Slovakia, we were in Krakow, etc. We wanted them to know that we were coming.

But it turns out, MaartenJan and Karin's email box was broken. So they only got our first message, from Spain, but after that, they just had to take it on faith that we really were coming. Eric was starting to get nervous that maybe they had given up on us, since they never emailed us back. He wanted to call them from Germany, but we were too broke. I wanted to wait until we crossed the border into Holland. (OK, I should be calling it The Netherlands, since the Netherlands is the name of the country, and Holland just refers to the western part. But even people in the Netherlands call it Holland).

With that in mind, we raced about 95kms across western Germany in one day. We started out on a bike path, and then cut over to a canal that heads directly west through the center of Germany. The canal was lined with bike paths, sometimes on both sides. I've always heard how people can ice skate to work in parts of Europe, and now I see how.

After stopping for ice cream on the bike path, we sped through Minden, had some beer in Bad Essen, and finally ended up in a campground near Osnabruck, a huge town.

The next day, we rode into town, parked our bikes for hours in a pedestrian mall, walked around, developed photos and bought a wedding gift for MaartenJan and Karin. I went to ship the photos from the post office, and met up with one of the rudest people of our whole trip: a western German postal worker.

When I walked up to the counter to send my package, I tried to speak to her in German. I admit, I speak only a very little bit of German, and I speak it poorly. But it's good enough for having basic conversations and getting around town. It worked all over former Eastern Germany, and in parts of west Germany. But it wasn't good enough for this postal worker. "Kein Englisch!" she screamed at me (No English), after I said in (bad) German that I wanted to send a package to the U.S. Then she walked away from the counter.

I was furious, but I had to send my package. So I smiled and yelled after her back, in German, that I was speaking German. She reluctantly turned. I went on, explaining what I wanted to do. She very, very grumpily agreed to help me, and then kept trying to charge me for things that I could see, according to the post office's own printed materials, were free of charge. Luckily, one of the lady's co-workers butted in, and explained to her that she was not allowed to charge me extra.

Unfortunately, this is my memory of western Germans. If Eric and I hadn't come from super-friendly, former East Germany just a few days earlier, I probably wouldn't really have noticed how frosty the Western Germans were. I probably wouldn't have taken it so personally when one waiter literally tried to block my path, rather than let me walk into a restaurant to retrieve my bike gloves, which I had left on my seat during lunch.

We're not the only ones who gripe about the western German lack of hospitality. Later, in Holland, our friend Karin, told us a similar story. Since she was getting married, she had to show her birth certificate. But she didn't have it. And since she was born in Germany, she had to go back to Germany to get it. So she went to her birth town, and asked, in German, for a copy of her birth certificate. The clerk there insisted that she couldn't understand Karin (who speaks fluent German). In the end, Karin had to leave without the certificate. She got a German cousin to retrieve it for her later. It turns out the Dutch hate the Germans, and vice-versa.

But don't leave this page hating western Germans. Eric and I have met lots of western German who were traveling abroad, and generally, they were great people. I don't know what's up with the western German clerks and shopkeepers. I'm sure there are plenty of unhappy clerks and shopkeepers in the U.S. and other countries. It just seemed like they were more common in western Germany.

After blowing almost all our daylight in Osnabruck, we finally started riding west. We ended up camping in a great campground in Ambergen, just short of the Dutch border. And the western German woman who ran the campground was extremely nice.

next: The Netherlands

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