We started the day with this wonderfully presented breakfast at our Minden bed and breakfast hosts.

Right at the start of our journey we saw this startling sight on the river – we believe that it is the old water mill that we tried to find in Minden the day before – we were told it was being restored. It looked like the military were assisting in transporting it on a barge back up the river.

This old windmill was at Petershagen, near a nuclear power plant – which had sponsored the restoration.

The next town was Stolzenau, which had cute statues of little fat people dotted around the town centre.

We spotted some more old windmills in the countryside during our morning ride.

      

Although the ride had started out relatively cool, the heat began building late morning and it was very hot when we reached Nienburg. We stopped here to admire this fountain and statue of people washing asparagus (spargel).

There was a bicycle shop on the main road so we bought a water bottle holder for Ester, which Kris installed, and some bicycle oil for my squeaky chain. Also some ice cream and juice from the supermarket to keep our energy up. It was still early in the afternoon, so we decided to carry on.

We realised that we had left town slightly in the wrong direction, and corrected and went to Eystrup. We were told there was one hotel in the town but we decided to move on to the next town. At Darverden we stopped and bought some cold drink and looked for accommodation as it was already 4pm. We couldn’t find any so we decided to continue to Verden, only 10km away.

We got very hot that afternoon, but the last part of the ride was more pleasant as there was a bit of shade alongside the road.

We got to the tourist information at Verden at 4.45pm, just in time before they closed. The lady there immediately offered us some bottled water because we looked so hot. She helped us find a reasonably priced hotel – the Werdenhof.

After checking in, Kris replaced the rear tire on Jenny’s bike, which was wearing unevenly and getting wobbly.

We had travelled 105km and we were tired and famished, so we ate kebabs from a cafe on the main square. There was a big marathon around the town that evening and we watched the runners (of all ages) go by as we finished our kebabs.

Later on we explored the town a little more, and ate an ice cream outside the horse museum. The marathon went on for a few hours, making it difficult to move around the old town centre. Verden is known as the “riders town” (Reiterstadt) and there are lots of references to horses and horsemanship all around town.