Last weekend, my boyfriend and I went on a small bike trip in the Mecklenburg lake region. It was the first multi-day bike trip I’ve done since I went to Sardinia last year, and after a winter of having multiple colds, I was pretty out of shape. It was great for me, because it helped get me back into shape. I think that if I keep training, I should be able to do more, longer trips over the summer.

We camped the whole trip, which was nice. I miss camping; I haven’t done it at all since I moved here. We cooked on a small propane cooker, which felt a bit like hobo cooking. The region itself was very lovely. We went through a national park, and through several nature reserves. We also found ourself in a lot of farming regions. There weren’t many cars; I was told that in some parts, only locals and buses are allowed to drive on the small, narrow backroads. Part of the route was unpaved, which was pretty difficult to bike through, but very scenic. Sometimes it felt as if time had forgot some of the little villages. Except for the odd satellite dish and parked car, I would have thought we’d wandered a couple hundred years into the past. We finished the trip in Brandenburg, in a region called the Uckermark. I previously knew this as the place that our milk and a lot of our vegetables come from. It was interesting to put some visuals onto those things.

The route itself was more challenging than I’d expected. I thought all of northern Germany was flat, but it’s actually very hilly. Having done most of my cycling in and around Berlin, I’m not used to biking through many hills. Part of the way felt like it was uphill most of the way. I could be wrong, but it could also be that we were cycling from lowlands to highlands. If I’m right on this count, it may have been easier to do the trip in the opposite direction. Part of the challenge was that I was on a new bike, and something came loose on the fender and rubbed against my tire, slowing me down quite a bit. The bike is really great, and I think once it’s “broken in” it should be great for many more tours. I did get a bit more into the rhythm of things after a while though. Hills are challenging at first, but once you build up some speed, you can go up and down them using your own velocity. In this respect, steeper hills are almost better than gradual inclines, as you build up more speed when you go downhill.

Overall, I’d recommend the trip, and I’d love to do it again at some point. Part of the Berlin to Copenhagen route that I’d like to do sometime runs through some of the same places. We even found ourselves on that route for a while.

Here are a few photos from the trip. I didn’t take too many, because I was on the bike most of the time, but I snapped a few when we stopped for snack breaks.

(Our bikes all packed up in front of the supermarket)

(Hobo cooking)

(We found ourselves in a town called “Speck,” which means bacon. There was no bacon to be found.)

(Large manor house in Speck, built in the 1920s)

(Church in Speck)

(A broken down barn somewhere along the way)

(A lovely old church with a wooden steeple, which is a rare sight in Germany).

(Grave at the church)

(The palace in Boitzenburg)