Although we woke up to gray skies, the day ultimately turned out to be considerably nicer, warmer, and sunnier weather-wise. We started the day in a fairly leisurely fashion with some blogging and photo selection for yesterday. Then I used ALL of yesterday’s brunch leftovers to put together one more breakfast for the six of us—we literally didn’t need anything we didn’t already have in the fridge or on the counter. Kai was clearly still peopled out from yesterday and didn’t join us, but we old farts all had a good time. Then Uschi packed up this and that to get ready to go back home to catch up with her granddaughter Lena and her friend Leah, and I walked her to her car, but promptly failed to guide her properly to her vacation rental, so we took about a 10-minute detour for a 2-minute drive. Oh well! She gathered her luggage from the rental, and took off for her hometown, Oldenburg (sadly, it took 6 rather than 3 hours for her to get home because there were two major construction-related traffic jams). I went to talk to Imke and Dorothee for a little, and then walked back home. I tided up for a little bit and we went for a little walk along the beach until it was nearly 2 pm, when we were supposed to meet Imke and Dorothee again and check out the teeny Eckernförde Museum with them.
There wasn‘t much at the museum (the former town hall on the adorable market square), but surprisingly, there was a small „history of old electric stuff“ exhibit that I‘m sure was some electrician‘s collection. We got to look at old methods of wiring, at old lightbulbs, switches and doorbells, and that was obviously a lot of fun for Mark. There was also the history of the town, of course, including the minor but locally famous „battle of Eckernförde“ during the war between Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein 1849, which was mostly remarkable for an explosion on a ship that happened AFTER the Danish fleet had already capitulated. So we got to look at the salvage from that and a dramatic painting of the battle, but that was not nearly as interesting as the doorbells and a china chamber pot that was apparently specifically designed to be used underneath long skirts for lengthy church services. 🙂 There were also a few photos from the all-important flood from 1872, which destroyed quite a lot of houses here, although no lives were lost, as well as documentation on the town during the Nazi era and in the immediate post-war time, when a lot of German refugees came here from areas of Germany that became Polish and Russian—of some interest to me because my mom and her family actually came to this region (to Rendsburg, about 20 miles from here) from further East. But because her own mother’s family actually originally came from here, she was never in one of the refugee camps that dotted the landscape here. The ration cards, various cooking contraptions like a „Kochkiste“ and, remarkably, a 1945 bridal gown sown out of parachute silk were all part of the ephemera that were collected here. We stayed for about an hour and then had coffee and Andrea‘s remaining brownies—with excellent vanilla gelato we had picked up on the way home—at our house. It was looking nearly sunny outside by the time Imke and Dorothee left around 4, and so a little while later, after Kai had actually gotten up and taken his shower, we decided a long walk was in order.
We decided to walk around the Windebyer Noor, the odd body of water that is immediately west of Eckernförde, separated from the bay by a natural dam of several hundred feet that gradually silted up and separated what was really originally another ice age bay from the ocean. The noor now looks like a lake, but has no outlet and no visible surface connection to the ocean. But there is enough subterranean connection to make the water „brackish,“ half salt water, half fresh water (3% salt). The walk around it is lovely, leading partly through tall trees, partly through wetlands and around the banks of the noor; we saw a lot of birds and a few major granite boulders pushed here all the way from Sweden by the last ice age. There were many little educational signs with good info on it, including one about the bog people, since the „Windeby girl“ and other bog „mummies“ were found right here, but most of our entertainment came from Kai asking me questions about cooking. I am not sure how much he‘ll retain, but theoretically, he now knows how to make stuffed mushrooms and a whole range of different potato dishes. Since he decided to become a vegetarian, that may really come in handy. We had walked a total of about 7 miles by the time we got home after 7, and had dinner right away. Kai „made nails with heads,“ as the Germans say when someone follows through with something, and had me show him how to sauté veggies and make an omelet. That was his dinner, while Mark and I had the left-over Greek food from the other day, and some Turkish Fladenbrot (not flat bread, but a soft wheel-shaped loaf with sesame seeds). It was all delicious, and we ARE finally working down our food stores to „manageable,“ since we are leaving tomorrow. We started one more load of laundry; Kai and Mark talked a little about tech, and we called it a day at nearly 11 pm.