19th April 2017. Sittensen, Germany.
We had such a peaceful night parked beside the water, sometime during the night the wind had dropped and when we opened the blinds this morning the water was like a millpond, reflecting the pale pink blush of the sky. It was a beautiful sight.
Our day was spent driving along motorways today, it was a long journey.
We saw more pretty flower fields as we left Medemblik, I restrained myself and only took a couple of photos of them today.
After about 20 minutes we came to a very long dyke where we stopped and climbed a tower to look out across the water, we didn’t stay there very long because it suddenly became very busy but the view was worth the stop.
I love our journeys we’ve seen so many unusual things as we’re driving along, interesting architecture and fancy bridges and baffles on the motorway. We had our fair share of them on this journey too.
We even saw a herd of fake Friesian cows outside one building which was quite unexpected especially as there was a real herd in the field opposite. William, if you’re reading this, they were the cow version of the fake elk that the Swedish government need to place at random points along the motorways to keep us tourists happy.
It was a shame today, I was very hungry and persuaded Darren to stop so we could buy a sandwich, we’d had some very tasty sandwiches over the last couple of days from Go Fresh at the services we’d stopped at.
This time the services were selling sandwiches by Deli 2 Go. My sandwich was such a joke I had to photograph it. It couldn’t have been any more basic if it had tried, it barely qualified as a sandwich, the roll was chewy, all that was inside were two thin slices of cheese which were dried up at the edges, there wasn’t even any butter inside!
Unfortunately I was so hungry that I ate it, at least it filled a gap. The only good thing about that stop was that we were able to watch the two horses and a cute little pony racing around in a field opposite us.
We found a supermarket when we arrived in Germany, did our shopping then popped across the car park to a little bakery and bought some goodies. The rolls were gorgeous but not what we expected, when I cut them open to put the savoury filling inside them I discovered that although they had seeds on the top they actually had dried fruit inside. That reminded us that we’d been caught out like that when we bought some rolls for a picnic when we were in Zwolle. We had opened a pot of hummus and ripped a roll apart to dip in it only to discover the dried fruit! It looks like we never learn. Nevertheless we enjoyed the rolls, the Germans bake great bread and cakes, it’s a good job we’re only here for a short time I can’t afford to put on any more weight!
As we continued on the next part of our journey we saw more deer than we’ve seen during the whole of our trip around Europe. Darren spotted the first herd of six in a field we were passing, ten minutes later I saw five more and then shortly after that we saw three others munching grass contentedly in a field. We can only conclude that this section of Germany has ‘dibs’ on all the deer in Europe! I wonder if they’re hiding all the elk too!
We had a very pleasant surprise when we arrived at the aire in Sittensen, the road led us between some mediaeval buildings, one of which was a watermill, and over a wooden bridge into the aire.
On the other side of the river was a park which was beautifully planted with lots of tulips.
We had a lovely (but freezing) walk around the park and then wandered up to the road to see what else we could find, as luck would have it we found an ice cream shop, which was due to close in 15 minutes, we got there in the ‘nick of time’ and the ice cream was not only the best we’ve had on this trip but it was also extremely good value for money.
We left the shop with a huge smile on our faces and wandered back along the river to the van. Luckily it was so cold outside that for once the ice cream didn’t melt and run down the outside of the cone, perfect!
What a lovely end to a day.
