Summer Running

I made it through the rain!

Here's me at the end of the final stage in the Castles Relay, a 20 stage two day race across Wales which starts at Caernarfon. I ran 10.7 miles from Caerphilly Castle to Cardiff Castle in fairly good conditions until I came into the park at the end when the heavens erupted and I got very very wet. Still we (Denbigh Harriers) beat Prestatyn Running Club which is the important thing.

Storking in Steinhuder

Ornothological spot of the week was a stork with chicks on her nest near Steinhuder Meer. We saw two or possibly three storkettes poking their heads over the edge of the nest which was built on top of one of the nesting poles erected in the marshes close to the lake.

The natural lake of Steinhuder is very popular with the Germans, it's about three times the size of Rutland Water and attracts plenty of visitors from the Hannover area - however they were virtually all locals scoffing Frischbrotchen and ice cream. Fish butties or fischbrotchen as they're called in German, seem very popular here and the favourite is with smoked eels (from the lake) and onions, although Bismarck and rollmop herring are both much in evidence. I had a fried fish brotchen and Vicky went for the Bismarck!

Tastes better than it looks!

And that was Germany - and this is me standing by Steinhuder Meer next to a chunky looking sculpture. As Lou will not be based in Germany any more there will be less reason for us to do any touring over here but we will come again. Driving is slightly more complicated than in the UK - wrong side of the road for a start - and you need to watch out for bicycles who seem to have right of way everywhere. One useful tip is , if you hire a car, get a bright coloured one. Most Germans own cars that are black or silver and our bright red Golf was easy to spot in a crowded car park!

http://marathons.ahotu.com/calendar/germany is a very useful website for finding races overseas and next time I really want to try to find a mountain or trail race. We did spend a night in Bamberg last year and do want to go back for more - the reason being that Bamberg, although a small city, is the real beer capital of Germany with several medieval breweries still producing such specialties as Rauchbier (smoked beer - fabulous!)

Could you please arrange a top up!

On a much more serious note we visited the Bergen-Belsen Memorial - this is the site of the infamous Belsen concentration camp. From 1940 to 1945 Belsen  housed many thousands of prisoners of war, Jews and other minority peoples. Around 70,000 are thought to have died there, around half of

them from an outbreak of typhus just before and after liberation. This was a comparatively modest number compared with some of the other extermination camps such as Auschwitz or Treblinka (over a million people are thought to have been killed in each) but Belsen was particularly well documented  and photographed by the liberating soldiers at the time and the resultant evidence was publicised widely - at the time this was shown to the British public in cinemas in contemporary newsreels. What was particularly horrific was the huge number of unburied corpses lying around and the photographic evidence is especially harrowing - you can look this up, I'm not going to upload any here but the museum and the site have quite an impact on visitors. The British soldiers demolished and burned the camp buildings to try to eliminate the typhus epidemic and almost all that remains are the mass graves where up to 2500 bodies at a time were interred.

She's there somewhere!

Bergen-Belsen is close to the Hohne garrison one of the largest British Army garrisons in Germany and we were very pleased to attend the parade of the Desert Rats, the 7th Armoured Brigade to which Lyndall's Military Working Dogs regiment is attached.
Over 400 troops received their Afghan medals on a very warm day and Krombacher, Bitburger and Herrenhauser all pitched their beer tents to provide post parade sustenance together with a hog roast!

While we were in this part of Germany we stayed at a lovely town called Celle which is full of half timbered buildings and fine parks and Vicky was very taken with a life size sculture of a horse and trainer in the grounds of the local schloss so she took a chance and stood beneath the big beast! We also managed to sample some of the local ale - it's not all pils and lager and we tasted dunkel (a brown beer), dunkel weiss (a brown wheat beer) and alt which is a very tasty speciality originaly from Dusseldorf. The tastiest of the lot in my book is the somewhat stronger doppel bock style which is from Munich but now found all over Germany - we were able to sample the Paulaner Salvator and Andechs versions....mmmmm! Won't say too much about the food but we had various schnitzels and sausages in ample portions - and the ice creams were pretty good.

What happened to the second girl?

And guess who made the podium - third in her age group in the Bentfelder Abendlauf 10K in a best time for two years of 67.55. Lou got 4th in her age group with one second slower than her pb in 52.31 and I sneaked onto the top of the podium rather struggling to get round in 42.14. Running is not the same in other countries - or is it? We saw the same early birds warming up and getting their entries in on time, runners from various clubs milling around together, competitors of all ages and wise cracks in the showers afterwards. Refreshments were a little more interesting though - each finisher had a pint of wheat beer thrust into their hand (this was non-alcoholic but the best non alcoholic beer I've ever had) and the barbecue sausage hit the spot!

Follow the Pied Piper

As we all should know from Robert Browning's poem, Hamelin was full of rats until the Pied Piper came along and led them away. However when we arrived there were rats everywhere including hundreds of brass rats all over the place set into the cobbles. Hamelin (Hameln in German) is a few kilometres west of Hanover and is a medium size medieval town. We drove down through delightful countryside and parked up outside a baker's shop for lunch - and that was full of rats too, these ones being made of bread! In fact we only saw a couple of pied piper statues in the town centre, the natives of Hamelin preferring to major on the rat theme with rats, rathauses and ratskellers everywhere. 

Phooey! Can't catch me.

Hanover has been described as a boring city probably because most of it got obliterated during the war but it does have some redeeming features such as an excellent tramway system which goes underground in the city centre and lots of open space including parks and gardens - in one of these we found some very well stocked glasshouses - this one featured amazing tropical flowering plants with small birds flying through the creepers. And Smurf found the turtles - he had to wait until there were no Germans in sight as he thought they might be very disapproving of this type of levity!

Oh go on turn your head round so we can have a better look at you!

Heading down to Bielefeld we visited a quite remarkable zoo spread over a large area in a forest. We found packs of wolves, rather large chunky bears which wouldn't turn round for the camera, lynxes (is that the plural of lynx?) and various other dangerous animals all of which exist in the wild in Europe today. In fact I was astonished to find out that bears can be found in more than a dozen European countries including Spain, Italy, Sweden and Greece. When you consider they can weigh over three times as much as me and can run at a speed of over 20 mph perhaps it's best to stick to road running on those countries!