Cycle Tour Iron Curtain Tour, part 3 Gdynia-Aš

Significantly worse than my mishap with the sleeping mat was the hole in the rim of the rear wheel that I noticed in a suburb of Helmstedt that same morning. A spoke had been torn out of the rim and was flapping around in the rear wheel. That repair also had to wait until Tuesday. So I twisted the loose spoke around the hub as I couldn't get it out through the cog cassette and rode on hoping the wheel would hold. And drove extra carefully across obstacles.

East of Helmstedt was the largest and most important border crossing for cars both for entry into the GDR and transit to West Berlin, and here I myself had many times sat in the back seat with my two brothers in our parents' car, always on the way to Dingelstedt am Huy, where our aunt, our beloved Aunt Gisela, lived with her husband Walter, a grumpy fellow. But Gisela was love itself, and some of my best childhood memories stem from these holidays in the GDR, which seemed very foreign to us. I now tried to convey that in another video "home" from the huge memorial, which makes the checkpoint from 1972 appear completely as it was then. The area here around Marienborn, where there had been a monastery around a holy spring ("born" means well in poetic German) was quite hilly, so I was sweating profusely. And emptied the lunchbox with a voracious appetite at the border memorial park at Hoetensleben. There were many people here on such a Whitsunday in the sunshine. But it is indeed a good and large facility that illustrates the invincibility of the border. There had also been a wall here so that the inhabitants of the village could not look over to the West.

After Hötensleben followed the large open lignite bed at Schoeningen, where lignite is still mined. Not very charming, and afterwards I wanted to avoid an annoying blocked road due to roadworks, but ended up in not less than eight kilometers of patrol path in the depression Grosses Bruch. Luckily I had enough water, but it was meltingly hot in the sun and there were no trees, so I got sunburnt on my arms. For most of the stretch I had to wheel the bike, so it was almost seven o'clock when I had got through, and there was still 30 km to Ilsenburg, where I had booked a hotel room. So I abandoned my route, found the fastest way using a route guide on Google Maps and arrived at the Berghotel Ilsenburg at a little after nine o'clock. Phew, it wasn't called a mountain hotel for nothing. But the location a little way up the north side of the Harz mountains was really nice. Here I was supposed to spend a day of rest on the second day of Pentecost. A very friendly waitress served me a large plate of food, even though the buffet had been cleared aside. And I got a beer with me in my room, which was placed in a in a separate building.