Check back next week for the nekkid’ Germans....

Wow, that was a lot of naked German men.
Wow, this is going to take some explaining.
After cycling to the Netherlands and back from my mother’s hometown in northern Germany (no, I was not using performance-enhancing substances – just look at my performance: it took me 12 and a half hours!), some of my family members suggested a bike path along a nearby river called the Ems.
This sounded nice, and I have a happy history or riding along rivers. While I was studying abroad in Freiburg, in southern Germany, I rode the Rhine all the way to Liechtenstein via France, Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
Riding alongside a big river generally means a pretty level path – no a whole lot of changes in elevation to pedal. And a good water-side bike path simplifies navigation pretty nicely. You just follow the river, enjoy the view and make good time.
So I figured I’d ride north out of Muenster to Greven, about 20 kilometers away, then ride up the river southeast to Telgte, and then head back west to Muenster. This would make a big triangle of maybe 60 kilometers or so – a little less than 40 miles.
But those little lines on the map don’t always match with the actual roads, and sometimes a little bushwhacking, a little bit of “well, that looks like a good direction” is necessary. Still I made it to Greven in good time and got a doener kebap at a Turkish fast food place.
A doener kebap is basically a Greek gyro in sandwich or wrap form – a quick lamb meal that can be Greek, Turkish, Turkey invaded Greece, Alexander the Great invaded Persia-part-of-which-is-now-called-Turkey, or as the band They Might be Giants said “Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople…”
... ehh, it’s from a part of world that’s swung both ways over the past few thousand years leading to horrible wars and some great fast food. More on the blog: jderrickstar.blogspot.com.
So I took my Turkish doener and German beer and started looking for the path along the river. I found a really nice brick lane that promptly ended in a few hundred meters. Then I found another that I rode for a while until it went into a private farm, and then into the farm’s fields and then into the field’s barbed wire (it’s called “Stacheldraht” in German).
It wasn’t the first time I’ve had to maneuver a bicycle past barbed wire. But at least this time I didn’t get an electrical shock.
On the other side of the fence was a bumpy, narrow dirt path along the river, leading (eventually) through a colony of sunbathers.
Check back next week for the nekkid’ Germans.