6th September 2016. Neukloster, Germany.
It was a bit of a nasty surprise when we opened the blinds this morning and found condensation on the cold windows, Autumn is beginning to show its face. Stay away Autumn we want Summer to remain!
Today we were leaving Neukloster to start our journey South, but as we hadn’t done much about it by 11.00 a.m. and the weather had turned out to be extremely nice we decided to stay for another day. We chose to spend the day feeding our faces again instead.
Darren had been wanting to go to the Bistro that we’d passed in the town, Bistro Central, so after I’d finished having a long overdue chat to my friend Janet, we cycled there.
It was a beautiful sunny day so we took the opportunity to sit in the beer garden. Thankfully the waiter was very helpful, we were confident that we’d be able to work out the menu now that Darren had the Google translate app on his phone (it uses the camera and changes the words in the image to English), but apparently its translation abilities are almost as limited as ours are!
We’re getting better at recognising words (I have my friend Debs to thank for that, when we visited Stockholm last year she pointed out how many words were similar to ours when you broke them down and we’ve found that if we don’t panic we can work out quite a lot) Darren worked out that ‘fleischlos’ meant ‘meat free’ (no that was actually one of the few words Google managed to translate) so that was my meal sorted, to be quite honest I hadn’t expected to find anything meat free on the menu, I was expecting to have salad again.
Darren gave up and asked the waiter to choose for him, something with meat, local and typically German; Schnitzel as it turned out. We both had a lovely meal with a nice glass of cold lager, without it costing an arm and a leg. The poor waiter had fun trying to translate the desert menu and between us we finally decided that the fruchtgrütze was fruit compôte, the rest of the words on the menu were similar to English so Darren had ice cream with apple sauce and schnapps and I had fruit compôte with ice cream and cream. The whole meal was lovely and we were made to feel really welcome.
We were so full after our meal that we both found it rather hard to cycle especially as in my wisdom I chose to go back to the site along a sandy track which went up hill! As luck would have it there was a bench at the top of the hill that looked out over the lake (at last a decent view of the lake!) so we sat there (Darren sat there after he’d pumped up his bicycle tyres) and let our meal go down.
We had an extremely lazy time back at the van, we got our chairs out and sat and read until the sun went down. What a fantastic day.
