Big dramatic thunderstorms late last night, and I packed up a pretty wet tent this morning.
I'm getting used to a new map again, and this one does not seem to distinguish well between paved and non-paved paths. After the amount of rain that fell last night this matters! I did a fair bit of getting stuck in sandpits this morning in the middle of some rather nice woods. Lots of flies around but only buzzers, not biters, else I would have been in trouble.
I was navigating roughly west across to the North Sea port of Bremerhaven. The landscape seemed both very rural and quite full of holidaymakers; some German schools are now on holiday and the number of kids on campsites etc has suddenly rocketed.
Had a rare lunch failure in a cafe in Bad Bederkesa: I was expecting meat soup with beans and figs (c/o the translator app) but I think perhaps it was dog meat soup with last night's scrapings from the fruit salad bowl. Feel a bit sick just thinking of it. In recompense to myself I having a banana split for my supper. (It's going to be hard going back to normal meals).
Bremerhaven is a big industrial port but I found my way through and rolled straight onto a ferry which was just leaving. This wended out through some port bits and over the estuary of the Weser, to a rather Bognor-like place called Nordenham.
Then I had lovely flat straight sunny run cross-country through the German part of Friesland. At least, there were plenty of black and white cows, and the local greeting has changed to 'Hoi!'. So we're definitely not in standard Germany any more.
Needless to say, it all looks Dutch to me. I apologise for this repeated comment - I guess I just never knew northern Germany looked like this, whereas I have lots of previous (happy) associations with Holland.
I cycled on following the sun to what feels slightly like the end of the world. In fact it's merely the western point of the peninsula. But all such places have a tendency to feel like the end of the road. In a good way.
On my map there's another ferry that I need to catch next, across a long stretch of what is largely mud flats at low tide. Florian kindly looked it up for me and we concluded it went between 9.45 and 5.45, perhaps when full. In fact it goes twice a day: at 9.45 and 5.45. As there's no camping close to the far side I decided to settle here for the night and take the ferry tomorrow morning. If bad weather comes in overnight this might prove to be an error... It's calm, sunny and beautiful at the moment but I know that's due to change!
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