OTR

I left Rostock at 9:00 am this morning and headed south toward Berlin. It’s a two day ride away, and I can’t help but think that what a car can cover in one hour will take me one day to ride the same distance. I rode local roads that cut through wheat and corn fields. I think I made a logistical error in deciding to ride from north to south, as the prevailing wind pattern so far seems to be from the southwest. Today’s wide was into a constant headwind and quartering headwind, which slowed my average speed by 5-7 km/h.

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Did I mention how bicycle-friendly Europe is? This is a typical bike lane in the larger cities. It's great how they use different paving surfaces and colors to differentiate between vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians. It's a great system. Why can't we in the U.S. do the same?

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My nightly destination was a campground (campingplatz in Deutsche) at a lake named Plau am See. Once again, I was surprised at the difference between European and U.S. campgrounds. The one I stayed at, Campingplatz Zuruf, had an outdoor stage with live entertainment by a duo called Schwarzblond, who performed a musical revue type show that is popular in Berlin. It was quite entertaining and they did several songs that had the German audience clapping and singing along. And of course there was the requisite biergarten that served up plenty of German beer, pretzels, and wienerschnitzel.

This entry was posted on July 30, 2010 at 7:35 pm and is filed under On the Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.