Less than 18km by the direct route, but we managed to turn it into a very slow 44km. The slowness I blame on sandy paths and serendipitous discoveries. We returned to the woods and discovered that the Brachter Wald nature reserve we were cycling through was once the largest ammunition dump of the British Army of the Rhine, and before that a store for the German army’s aviation fuel during WWII. It was vacated in 1996, and active conservation since then, combined with its earlier military restrictions, means that it has a wealth of rare flora and fauna. Some of the fauna must be pretty big: to cross one large area, we had to push our bikes through enormous turnstiles to keep the freilaufende Tiere inside. We saw one fallow deer: with that kind of build-up, I had expected more.

It was a sunny Sunday and lots of people were out cycling, strolling and walking their dogs along roads built for tanks and amongst enormous sand embankments built as shelter walls around the ammo dumps: not quite swords into ploughshares, but close enough.

Nettetal just seems to be a collection of small towns clustered around a line of ponds – something to do with former peat-mining? – and the river. It has a hotel: a good enough tourist attraction for us. A good, basic, family-run hotel (the mother and daughter remind me of youth hostel wardens of 40 years ago) that belongs to an earlier time. It once catered for commercial travellers (do they still exist?) and all the other guests are over 70.