Since we’re the only English speakers on board we’ve been seated with a couple of the tour staff members. They’re very nice men, but it has also created an uncomfortable segregation. The other guests don’t seem particularly inclined to talk with us and it’s kinda lonely. We’re also on the low end of the age curve so there aren’t many folks that we’d probably have much in common with. There’s one woman, Christine, who is traveling by herself and who we visited with a little in the mandatory orientation last night. Like us, she will be riding a push bike, not an ebike. The majority are riding ebikes, so even though most of them are older than us, they’ll probably still be much faster. Christine is in very good shape and will probably ride a lot faster than us on the push bike.
Apparently on the last tour they had a whole table of English speakers. Some folks from Britain, the US and Finland. I would love to be able to speak better German so that I could converse with the folks on the tour, but my skill level is really just at ‘get basic needs met’. I can’t hold down a proper conversation. Sigh.
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Today is the longest and most complicated riding day so we got our own personalized overview in English today. The forecast has been calling for rain all day today for the last week, but that fizzled away into a few showers around 1pm. The showers actually showed up around 11am but didn’t last long. It was a really nice day for riding and Brent and I were really happy to be on some bikes. I’m super relieved that the longer ride (not quite 50km) didn’t trigger any post-Covid hacking, which both of us have been having a bit. Rügen is a very flat and agricultural island. Most of our riding was through fields and forests, punctuated by the occasional really pretty little town. Putbus is a little on the larger side and we thought we might stop there for first beer, but with all of the beer behind us by the time we climbed up to town we decided to go all the way to Lauterbach for first beer. We arrived at the same time as our boat… about 2:30pm.
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The boat were on has a captain, a manager of hotel operations and a manager of the cycle tour. The cycle tour manager is the fellow who’s table we’re assigned to for meals. He also has an assistant who sits with us. We’ve really enjoyed getting to know them a little and find out how they got involved in running Bike and Barge tours. The manager is a retired police officer from the Netherlands. He REALLY likes people. We’ve pondered how he would have done as a traffic cop. The world can use more traffic cops who really like people, we think. The assistant got into this field later in life and quite accidentally. His wife works on cruise ships and one time she fell ill and couldn’t go to work, so he stepped in in her place, and the rest is history. Fascinating.
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The crew has a great ‘bucket brigade’ process for moving all of the bicycles on and off of the top deck of the boat. Many hands make light work!
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