We managed to make our way to the Brandenburg gate on Wed morning bright and early and start our "historic" ride across northern europe !! When I say bright what I mean is one of the few moments of dry weather we got this week, but we started out and thought maybe 60-70km would be a good first day as we are not really bike riders !! We had asked our more experienced friend Tim's advice and he told us that the only thing to make sure of is a good pair of padded bike shorts, so we had these and felt ready to take on the world !!
The first 20km were in the city limits and I thought we would never be out in the countryside but eventually we seen some green and then the fun started !!
We knew hills were never really going to be too much of a problem and thats how it turned out but we did not realise how windy it was going to be and the first clue was all of the wind farms we started to encounter as we made our way north west !! As you can expect the wind has been a headwind all the way which when you have 30kg of gear on your bike ( never decide what you need to bring while blind drunk at 6am) takes a lot of the fun out of the ride !! Looking at the map we thought the first campsite we would reach was 70km from Berlin and optimistically we aimed for it, but as it turned out at 70km we saw the roadsigns for Weineberg still said 30km to go and having no other option we went for it. ariving at the campsiteour speedometer read 102km which for a first day we were thrilled with even if it took us all day to achieve !!
We made camp and cooked up some "lovely" dinner ......... rice with onions and lots of peppers and at 10pm were already soundly sleeping and prepared for another 100km tomorrow !! At 5am we were awoken by torrential rain which never stopped all day long so we were confined to our campsite for the day with nothing to do except read a book and cook more food and plan for the next day hoping for better weather !! Day 3 was slightly better and we made our way to the next stop which was a campsite at a town called Lanzen and it took us only 4 hours to ride 89km which we were really impressed with. We set up the tents again just as the rain started and found a little bar/restaurant on site and settled in for the evening !!
I may have forgotten to mention how much pain we felt in our legs and butts already after only 2 full days riding, but Tims advice about the shorts was the best advice ever !! Day 4 .......... more rain but knowing we had to keep moving or we would never make hamburg we braved the rain and rode about 60km in terrible conditions and found a town called Hitzacker and stayed here on saturday night knowing we had 100km left for Sunday. With a better weather forecast we aimed to make hamburg for lunchtime and hopefully manage to find an Irish bar to watch our beloved local gaelic football team.......... Westmeath start their leinster championship campaign !! Sunday was almost a total success , we made hamburg in time , found the irish bar watched the game but our team lost badly. So after many ups and downs we made our first leg of the trip and completed our 350km ride to Hamburg !!
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