Day 14 - It all gets too much

Next morning we made a pretty speedy exit from the dodgy campsite, it was still pouring with rain and we were hungry and cold. Poor Sylvie had felt so sad the night before and we just wanted to get on.  We were once again on the road to Plon, I was really aching from my fall the previous day and my hand looked pretty freaky. The road to Plon split many different ways and we were frustrated that we were so low on luck. We had done only about 10km when we found a lovely bakery and as we were so cold we decided to stop for breakfast before Plon. The cafe and it's staff were lovely and we sat for a while and warmed up. We were able to look at our route again and choose a new way to Putgarden (the ferry port to Denmark) that would mean we wouldn't have to go  through Plon which now seemed to us a made up place. Slightly cheered we wrapped up warm and stepped outside. Sylvie's back tyre was flat again! We got on the case and made the change taking real care to check the tyre and rims. Cold again, we set off down the road and not 10 meters on her front tyre went down. It was now raining heavily and we were just completely miserable. It seemed everything was going wrong and we were getting unhappy.

We decided to head to a town called Eutin which was on the way to Putgarden and importantly was marked on the map with a palm tree, this place had to be good. As we neared the town I had to smile to myself, we had been cycling in driving rain yet right above this little town was a clearing in the sky and yes we could see blue, but it was only over this town. Maybe the palm tree meant it was always sunny?

I was really sore and aching by now from my fall and spotting a sign for the railway station I begged Sylvie to see if it would at least be possible to get a train to Putgarden. She finally agreed and we headed to the train station. The woman at the counter said that due to engineering works it would not be possible to take the train with our bikes as they were running a replacement bus service instead. I cried, I was so cold and low and I just wanted to get to the port and get on the ferry to Denmark. I couldn't beleive that even trying to get on a train was going wrong for us. As I sat down completely dejected on the cold radiator in the waiting room whilst Sylvie went to the loo, I looked at the buses going to Lubeck. I ran out to speak to the driver, could they take us? I could see there would be room for a bike or even 2, please could they take us? They smiled and said warmly that they would if we could be ready in 3 minutes sharp. I ran to get Sylvie and 3 minutes later we and our bikes were on the bus. Our failure gets worse I'm afraid, from Lubeck we were able to take a train to Putgarden. We did so and although we both felt really awful about it (we had so wanted to do this trip without getting on a train) it was completley the right thing to do. After 14 days on the road and with so many things going wrong over the past few days we were utterly exhausted. Sylvie slept the whole way and I just read my book-

As we sat on the ferry to Denmark, Sylvie just looked at me and said "we got the train" we were both gutted. We had only missed out 50 miles of our trip but it was still a missing stage.

But all things have a silver lining and as we sailed towards Denmark the rain cloud that had hung over Germany stayed there and we sailed under a perfect double rainbow (Richard of York gave battle in vain) to a sunny Denmark.

We pedalled off the ferry and stopped at the nearest garage to ask directions to the campsite and a shop. It was late so the supermarket was closed but the garage had a few supplies so we ended up spending 7 pounds (I'm writing this on a Danish keyboard so there is no pound sign!) on a box of cereal and a carton of milk, eeeek it's going to be expensive here.

A few miles up the road we found our campsite, complete with a beautiful kitchen. Boy were we happy and laughed at the irony that we literally only had pasta to cook in it. Still pasta with some nice olive oil, a bit of black pepper and garlic with a cucumber salad can be a very fine dinner when eaten in such nice surroundings. We finished off with a game of scrabble before we had a shower and went to bed.

We were ready to get back on our bikes........................................