Today we set out again for the last section of our bicycle tour – from Berlin to Hamburg.

This morning we took the S-bahn train out to Potsdam, which is as far as the line goes, and cycled from there.
There was a light rain for the first hour, but luckily it never got any worse and we didn’t need to take out our rain gear.
We rode past the Neu Palace in Potsdam, seeing it for the second time. We had walked around it with Elsbeth a week ago.

Neu Palace – photo from sight seeing with Elsbeth (24 June)

Our next big town was Werder and then Phoben. There we got onto the Havel bike route and that took us almost all the way to Brandenburg. It was a beautiful route, alongside the river and wetlands.

There were also a lot of insects again – all our itchy bites had healed up during our Berlin stay and now we were stung again – after we stopped for a mid morning snack and break at this lovely spot.

The mis-hap of the day was Kris breaking a spoke just about a kilometer from Brandenburg. This is only the second incidence of broken spokes on this trip. To our dismay, we couldn’t find our socket to remove the rear cassette – a vital tool without which we could not replace this spoke. We rode into the town and found the nearest bicycle workshop. They wouldn’t sell us a tool and they were too busy to replace the spoke for us. However they were quite friendly and did lend us their socket, so Kris replaced the spoke in the parking lot. We then went to Tourist info to get the addresses of other bicycle shops. The first one we went to did sell us a socket – we hope there will be no more broken spokes this trip, but you never know. We ate some ice cream and pastries in Brandenburg, and then continued on the journey.

The ride after Brandenburg was less scenic, on a mixture of bike paths and small country roads.

I don’t know what this crop is, but it sure is pretty

We got back onto the Havel river cycle route and rode through Briest and Teickaw. From here we departed from the official route to ride on the north side of the river to our destination for the day – Premnitz (a shorter route). In all, the day’s ride was 94km long.

We stayed at the Hotel Super Bowl in Premnitz. It is a small hotel alongside a bowling alley, where we drank beer and watched the locals bowling.