We made it

Here we are at our bicycle tour destination in the "Luther City" of Wittenburg. For those of you not familiar with church history this is where Martin Luther in the early 15th century took a stand against the practices of the Catholic Church that required money to be paid in order to get forgiveness of sins. He nailed 95 statements of faith to a church door here and challenged anyone who desired to present arguments against the statements (theses). It is historically known as the beginnings of the Protestant faith. In the short time we´ve been here we`ve realized how much history and beauty there is for us yet to see. We decided that we would spend the night here and have my uncle, Leo, pick us up tomorrow.

The last 3 days of bike riding have been wonderful as we continue to be amazed at the German countryside, farms, gardens, and villages with quaint, neat houses clustered everywhere. We learned why the common way to do this bike ride along the Elbe is to start in the north (down river) and ride to the south (up river). In one word the reason is "WIND". The winds here tend to blow from the north to the south. And this spring they did what they tend to do. We did a great deal of hard pedaling against the headwinds, especially Tuesday and today. Temperatures have been quite cool--mostly overcast and gray, but no rain! We kept telling ourselves that the headwinds were good training for RAGBRAI.

When we were in Dresden on Monday evening with the Tyler´s a bad thunderstorm passed through. We learned yesterday from someone who had a local newspaper that a German word that has carried over from English is the word "tornado". It was in the headline of the newspaper and as we were riding yesterday we passed through a couple of towns that had suffered much wind damage. There were people out everywhere cleaning up downed branches and debris and heavy equipment making repairs and hauling off large broken trees.

Tuesday night we stayed in the fairly large town of Reisa and had time to stroll around in the evening and look at the sights. Last night was the total opposite--a very small village called Dommitzsch. But the accomodations were equally wonderful. We have not had one bad meal since we´ve been here and nothing but clean comfortable rooms for the night. On today´s ride a lot of the trail went around a large nature park. We saw deer, herons and storks and many other birds, some of which are familiar to us but others we´ve not seen before in the States. A lot of people ride on this "Elbe Radweg" bike path, some of them just locals making their way somewhere to do errands, but, others like us, obviously out for a multi-day excursion. A distinction, though, is that the vast majority of those who use the trail are Germans. We´ve learned to call out our "Guten Morgen" and "Hallo" greetings and hope to find someone who understands enough of our stumbling "Americaneze" to get us a restroom or other needs.

Next post will be from Leipzig where we will spend the weekend with Schwesinger family.