Germany

Well this week I ventured to the country some call Germany, and others Deutchland. It was quite an epic journey and I will start from the begining. I had decided to ride to James' which according to a reliable source (google maps) was 125km away. I was giving myself 4.5 hours to get there and since James had a race and wasnt home till 6, I decided to leave a 2.30pm so he would be able to meet me somewhere.

The journey started off badly as I headed in the complete wrong direction as I left home and realised 5k later, and by the time I had turned around and had to travel back past home I had already done 10k for no gain. This was kinda depressing and I contemplated just going home but I journeyed on and decided maybe I would give myself 5 hours to get there. Little did I know that was only the begining of my problems.

I got to my first planned destination, Aachen which is right on the German-Belgium border. I got there with no major problems as we had ridden there a few times for training. But this is where all my problems began. Aachen is a big city and it took me a good 30 mins to find my way through it. I then began riding into small towns zigzagging my way north. After 4 hours I was still 80k away from Krefeld the fastest route and was getting a wee bit worried. Germany has no signs to places which is annoying so I had James texting me a list of towns to get to. This worked for a while and after 7 hours in the saddle i was only 40k away. Only problem was it was 9.30pm and getting quite dark. It was at this point I seriously considered having a kip on the side of the road since it was a warm night and starting afresh the next day. But with the thought of Krefeld on my mind I soldiered on and finally found a train station. I ended up jumping on the train the last 30k and arrived at 11pm abit tired.

Apart from the ride to Krefeld my week in Germany was good, I went and visited Julia our old exchange student who lived 50k away then on the way home we came across a WW2 Allied Cemetry. It was quite a somber place and you could feel the silence as we looked around. Of the 3000 odd graves 104 NZers where buried here so its quite a small world really.

We ventured around Krefeld city and its hundreds of shops which was a nice change from our bakery, marche, fritire, and pub in Belgium, and saw a few drug fried homeless people which is always abit funny/sad at the same time. But really we didnt do alot just relaxed and did abit of training so was a nice trip and broke the boredom of Belgium, so a few more trips are defenitly on the cards in the coming months.

I also had a couple of races up there but they will be included in my next post

Hope all is well

Chur