Peddling the Dirt, Baltic Germany

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Oh Rugen Island and German north coast, how impossibly imperfectly perfect you are.

This ride involved two international ferries, two local ferries, seven train trips, 388 cycled kilometres and way too many cobblestones. It started and finished in the stairwell of our Lithuanian Soviet-built flat and covered almost every kind of road/track/trail surface possible. It was easy, it was hard, frustrating, fantastic, heart-breaking and heart-warming. It was an adventure.

I spent hours meticulously planning every painful little detail of this journey. A big thanks to Ride with GPS .com and your cycle route mapping software.  Also thanks to Susanne Hill, who gave us actual physical maps along with a wee bit of porridge. Without the two of you we would have been even more lost.

Germany: big brother cannot see you. How come you do not have Google Street View? Do you have any idea how much easier and more boring our trip would have been if I could have seen the road surfaces before setting sail?

I had been led to believe that German cycle tracks would all be lovely, wide, flat and happy stretches of asphalt. Oh how drastically wrong I was. I would not recommend this trail for other tour-cyclists. It is over-signposted, liberally peppered with the upside down smile-lines of the indigenous population and has absolutely nothing out of place.

If you are as stupid as us and don’t like your butts and bicycles that much, then give it ago, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.  If there is any intelligence in you, then perhaps the wiser option would be settling for reading this story.

This was the best cycle holiday that we have had to date. Please do continue to read for the grit and grime of our body odour stricken peddling exploit.

Introduction
Day 1 – Setting Sail
Day 2 – Training, part 1
Day 2 – Training, part 2
Day 3 – New Expectations, part 1
Day 3 – New Expectations, part 2
Day 4 – Cobbles, part 1
Day 4 – Cobbles, part 2
Day 5 – Each Other, part 1
Day 5 – Each Other, part 2
Day 6 –  A Sprocket of a Day, part 1
Day 6 –  A Sprocket of a Day, part 2
Day 7 – Bonking, part 1
Day 7 – Bonking, part 2
Day 7 – Bonking, part 3
Day 8 – Time Keeping
Day 9 – Homeward 
Day 10 – Ouch

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