Let me say up front that the photos for today do not adequately represent that this day was very windy, quite chilly, and a crazy mix of sunny and partly cloudy stretches interspersed with brief but massive downpours (I think at least five during the day, and for sure three more after we had returned home). We dodged all but one of them!
After we had gotten up and gone through our various morning routines (which in my case included answering some emails relating to a conference I am helping out to, which has taken much more of my time than I expected), we took off for a little road trip to the Baltic Coast around 9:30. My sister loves me and knew that I wanted to get my “ocean fix” so she had suggested it for our special weekend here. We headed to a small resort town called Heiligenhafen that’s only about an hour and a half from here, through beautiful countryside on mostly windy roads with one surprise stretch of Autobahn. It has a little peninsula connected to town by a narrow land bridge and a beautiful marina packed with sailboats, and a nature preserve with a special breeding ground for a kind of seagull called a storm gull (Sturmmöwe), a bit too far off to see clearly and an observation tower for birds. We spotted several birds during this walk we had never seen before, and because Mark borrowed a lens with more zoom from Judith (funnily enough, his own older lens that he had given her a while back), we actually have photos of some of them!
After our walk out to the nature preserve through the dunes (and having gotten good and wet) and then back to the main area of the promenade, we had wonderful burgers, fries, and little fried things from a Portuguese café on the boardwalk (under an awning while it rained again, and then briefly explored the town of Heiligenhafen itself, which has a beautiful brick church from the 16th century (the “Danish gable” was added in 1637)
About 2 pm, we decided we’d seen all we wanted to see, and drove a bit further, to another small coastal town called Howacht. There, we waited out another quite aggressive downpour in Judith and Michael’s car, and even had the cheesecake we brought for an afternoon pick me up in our “Café Kangoo” (their very spacious Renault, which has a sort of box shape). Once the sun came back out, it turned beautiful, and we finally got to go down the waterfront, and I even got to stick my feet in the water. (The Baltic is never quite as cold as you would think, but it was certainly not swimsuit weather.)
By about 5 pm, we headed back to Judith and Michael’s on a gorgeous roundabout route. We stopped for one more little walk near a river and another estate (Gut), Wahlstorf.
We were home about 6 pm, and since we had picked up some excellent supermarket sushi (and some yakisoba noodles with chicken for Mark) we had our dinner ready without any additional prep. Judith and Michael are quite the connoisseurs on sushi (they have traveled to Japan several times and know the real thing) and it was a feast–including the best mochi I have ever had. Quite a yummy end to the day, but we were all quite tired and went to bed much earlier than yesterday. What a fabulous day.
