Today is Pentecost (Pfingsten), which is a big holiday in Germany. Monday is also a public holiday, but the main day to celebrate and enjoy seems to be the Sunday. We enjoyed seeing the people out and about enjoying themselves as we rode through Leipzig.

The ride (from Zeitz to Delitzsch) was 80 km overall and relatively flat, mostly on dedicated bike paths, making it very do-able. Our hands were just still a bit sore from the long ride yesterday.
We continued following the Elster bike path for the first 40 km or so, which was mostly tarred. It felt good riding along at a steady pace, and even being able to ride side by side a lot of the time (because the bike path was so wide). There were few people out and about early on Sunday morning, mostly dog walkers.
We saw a wood carved man sitting on a bench right near the start of our ride, at Zangenberg. The man is Prof Dr Johannes Thienemann (1863-1938), an ornithologist who established the practice of ringing birds to study their migratory habits.

Our route went through Pegau and then around the two lakes to the south of Leipzig – the Zwenkauer See and the Cospudener See.

We started to see groups of people on bikes at the start of these lake rides (around 10 km before Leipzig). These increased, most coming from the Leipzig direction. At some points we couldn’t pass by slower cyclists due to the number of bikes on the path (kind of like a traffic jam for cyclists). There were whole families with little kids riding their own bikes and even smaller kids tied to the parents bikes, groups of young people, groups of older friends, couples, people with dogs on bikes. I counted three tandems (the only ones of the trip so far). It felt like every bicycle in Leipzig was out and about.
Looking through the trees around the lake we could see parked bicycles and people sitting on the shore or swimming.

When we got away from the lake and onto the canal path into Leipzig, the number of bikes did not ease. Now we also saw lots of kayaks and canoes on the river – and even more being set up alongside the banks. (unfortunately I failed to catch all this activity with my camera – we were so immersed in the hustle and bustle ourselves)

As we have previously visited Leipzig, staying for two nights in 2017, we didn’t try to do any sight seeing. We just wanted to pass through the city. This required a bit of zig-zaging and navigation to get on track going away from the Elster and heading to the north. The inner city infrastructure was reasonably good to navigate through with a bicycle. We moved off the Elster cycle way and onto the Saale river cycle way.

This field of poppies was just on the way out of Leipzig. We see lots of poppies alongside the road, but this was an exceptional display.

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We rode past another lake, the Werbeliner See, just before Delitsch. There were still quite a few other cyclists riding on the bicycle paths with us.

Delitzsch didn’t seem very promising as a destination as we approached. However it began to look better and better and we were delighted when we got to the town centre. There is a small castle and the town is surrounded by a moat.

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We walked around after checking into our hotel and drinking a recovery beer there (it was very hot). We looked at the various restaurants, drank a weisse beer at one of them, ate an ice-cream cone. Eventually we ended up in a Russian restaurant on the town square. It was very popular and we could see why – good food at reasonable prices (the borscht soup was excellent). The Russian saying on the menu (below) seemed to sum up the feeling of our evening.

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