From Germany to the Netherlands and back again. We cycled past more of the Nettetal ponds, then an old wartime airfield on the border before joining the Maas at Venlo – a place I associate with changing trains. We cycled north beside the river to Arcen and through the Maasduinen – a sandy ridge between the two countries – back into Germany. Here I stopped to photograph a heather nursery, which was quite striking.
And now we are back in Kevelaer.
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.
There was a definite autumnal feel to leaving Weert this morning – a chill, a crispness. Through fields – asparagus, spinach beet, maize – to Roermond and then, once over the border, on a very stony path through woods that took all my concentration.
I hadn’t quite realised – I mean, fully taken in – how long the liberation of Europe took. From the D-Day landings in June 1944 to VE Day on 8 May 1945. That’s a very long time to wait for a war to end. We crossed the border east of Roermond and came across a memorial to men in this still-occupied part of the Netherlands shot for evading the forced conscription of labour by the Nazis in December 1944. I recalled visiting Otterlo, where the last battle in the Netherlands between the Allied forces and the Nazis took place in April 1945. It also links to the former Javelin barracks that we passed as we left the wood: an RAF base in the decades after the war.
Again. Along the Rhine embankments into a headwind. Sheep were penned into small plots, and one small herd looked particularly comical with their stern expressions and dropping ears. The landscape was flat and rather dull, and again I noticed how high the river was, covering the trunks of willows. Nijmegen was comprehensively bombed so it’s rather dull too.
I assume that peacocks are not early risers: we were woken only by rooks and cockerels. And heavy rain. Which eased off before we left the hotel, thank goodness. This evening we’re back in Emmerich am Rhein.
More bucolic cycling – this time to spend the night in the Netherlands. A street in Dinxperlo is bisected by the Dutch-German border. I don’t think it is a town with anything else of interest. Except maybe for a wildlife park next to where we are staying: I can look forward to a night disturbed by peacock calls and cockcrows.
I thought I’d factored in religious festivals – days when shops close and even open cafés can be hard to find. I knew we were safe from Himmelfahrt and Pfingsten this holiday, but Corpus Christi (Fronleichman) caught me out today in this Roman Catholic part of Germany.
Not that it mattered. It was a repeat ride from last year with no other surprises, and there were enough cafés open for two coffee stops.
Oh, and I think I’ve discovered that roadside wind turbines interfere with the working of cycle computers. So that’s 200m to add to today’s tally.
Old Shoe Box 