A trip to Schleswig-Holstein
Dear readers,
We have had some "radio silence" for a while. I suffered from a bout of writers block. Yes, we did visit Hawaii for several weeks, hopping between 3 islands, and Yes, I loved the place and took hundreds of pictures, drove in a cabriolet topless on any major road we could find and often on clay roads not necessarily intended for tourists, I never saw flowing lava, never saw the widely publicized whales. We stayed in rented apartments and hopped with Hawaiian Airlines in comfort seats and with priority boarding for 10 US extra per leg. (This is my tip of the day, although you need to sign up for their frequent flyer program)We returned home in time to celebrate Christmas with Sandee's extended family and in January traveled for Sandee's birthday week to Miami.
Always had camaro's on all islands
The famous red clay road on the big island
We stayed in our vacation home in Duck at the Outer Banks for a few weeks and arrived Easter Sunday in Amsterdam.
So you are now up to date (and yes, I will post a few pictures of above happenings for you to enjoy).
And thus we start as of today blogging as if I never stopped, and this time about a place most people never heard of: Bredstedt, Schleswig-Holstein in Germany a few miles below the Danish border on the west side of a Peninsula, that in Denmark is called Jutland. Here we expect to enjoy the German Watten.
(A few days later:)
Well we arrived late afternoon, after a pleasant train ride and there I realized I committed a bloggers crime of proportions that defy description: I left my camera in Amsterdam. So all pictures you will see are iPhone pictures.
Ok, the next morning after an extensive German local hotel "fruhstuck buffet" we set out to see the east side of this peninsula where the cities of Flensburg and Kiel are situated, only because we were promised a day of rain, which we got by the way and these western lowlands look gloomy in that type of weather. We came for the Wadden or Watten in German, which translate as the wad, or the mud flats, or the shallows, which lay in tidal low waters, creating a landscape of birds and seals and groupings of islands before the coast, which we would visit by ferry. The landscape we see on the peninsula itself is marshland, moors and farms, where Holsteiner cows produce the largest quantities of German consumed milk.
To be correct, these Holsteiners are actually black and white Friesian cows originating from the Netherlands, and brought to Holstein through exported semen from famous Dutch bulls centuries ago (the last famous semen producing bull was called Toystory and its owners sold 2.4 million units in the thirteen years he was active) with genetic traits that bring forth the best large production milk cows (average lifetime production per cow is 26,000 liter or 6,900 US gallons).
The American importers started calling them Holsteiners and the name stuck worldwide. The last presidential Holsteiner cow, who wandered the White House lawn belonged to the Taft family, where the heavy set president and his well rounded daughters were daily supplied with the needed quantity of fresh milk by their cow, Pauline Wayne.
Enough about these cows, which we did not see anywhere, but definitely smelled often traversing the country lanes. To be fair I should mention that the Holsteiner horse was bred and genetically developed here unlike the cow, which gives this peninsula bragging rights either way.Flensburg turned out to be the better city to visit and Kiel may have qualities we did not find. We found ourselves constantly hurrying back to the dry safety of our car and marveled about the fact that fellow travelers here endured the weather on bikes.
The next day we took the ferry to the island of Foehr on the best, although very windy day and were pleasantly surprised to find cute thatched roofed homes in cobblestone villages. We traversed the whole little island and returned on an earlier ferry as the rain started pelting us again. The next day was scheduled to visit the peninsula of Sylt via an auto train, traversing us and our loaded car over the narrow land tong that connects the peninsula to the mainland.
This never happened: waking up the next day the weather forecast had worsened and from our breakfast table we stared at the rain and unhappy tree branches swinging in the wind.We pulled the plug and returned one day early to Hamburg and found our familiar Marriott hotel room to wile away the day. As we are scheduled to return next year to Hamburg with friends we felt no remorse in not even exploring the neighborhood.
Amsterdam awaits with better weather.
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