"Let's take the scenic route," they said.

Travemünde is located on the Baltic Sea, about 20 km from Lübeck. That's about 12 miles. So Jim and I got the great idea to rent bikes and ride them there and back as a nice day trip. Fun, right?

Yes, fun! So, we got a handy map from the tourist bureau (please forgive the formatting, but it is important to remember that we got the map from the tourist bureau) with various routes inscribed upon it, including a scenic route along the Trave River. Great! Jim loves water, so we chose that route for our outbound journey.

We were going to have a lovely bike ride, and then devour a delicious Matjes (herring) sandwich for lunch in Travemünde.

The man at the bicycle rental agency said that if we rode at a normal pace we'd be there in an hour.

We left Lübeck at 10:30 AM. We reached Travemünde at around 2 PM.

That's 3.5 hours.

The first part of the journey was lovely. Here are some picture to prove it. These were taken when we were still 'frisch und munter'.

Selfie on the Trave

German bicycle paths are legendary. They are plentiful, they are wide, they are well marked, they are well maintained.

And so was this one, in the beginning.

Then it got narrower. And rougher. And obstacles began to appear, like large stones.

That's how Jim got a flat tire.

Flat tires happen. No biggie. We'll just find a bike shop. Everyone rides bikes here, they must be everywhere!

The path got even narrower, with dense foliage on either side. As in: grasses that were taller than Jim.

That's when I said, “I feel like I'm on the set of The African Queen...” You remember, this part:

(That's when I was still chipper, before the cursing started.)

Then, the “bike path” became a muddy rut, with fallen trees to negotiate. That's when the cursing started.

It got worse before it got better.

But then it got better. We emerged from the jungle onto something that resembled a bike path. Then we found the place where we needed to catch the bus to navigate the “Herrentunnel” (no cycling thru this tunnel.)

The bus driver noticed Jim's flat tire, and I asked him where we could find the nearest bike shop. Then he started soliciting help from the other cyclists on board, and that's when a guardian angel in the form of a weatherbeaten German man offered us a small container of compressed air that would fill Jim's tire and get us to the nearest bike repair place, which was about a mile from the tunnel.

We biked there, and they were nice enough to help us right away. Tire fixed.

At that point we decide we're both still full of fighting spirit, and continue on to Travemünde, where we had a lovely lunch and walk to the end of the breakwater, and here are some pictures:

The Passat, a famous Windjammer 

Selfie on the Baltic!

The Baltic Sea and fun clouds

You're not on the Mississippi anymore, Tom!

Ferry between Travemünde and Rostock

Jim, the old salt, was agog at all the lovely sailboats on the water!

One last word about the 'scenic route': I said to Jim, “Oh, we must have just gotten lost, there's no way that the tourist bureau would hand out a map with faulty information, not in Germany, where it's so orderly.”

And he replied that we were on a narrow strip of land in between two bodies of water, how and where would we have gotten lost, exactly?

Hmmm... good point.