Well, there’s nothing like a bit of wild camping to get you up early! Straight up, banana for breakfast and pack up – trying to pack as little of the forest with you! I might need to do this again as I was pedalling towards Westerkappeln by 6:30. All along lovely quiet lanes, the surrounding land is all marked as nature/bird reserve, and I nearly cycled into a woodpecker at head height, and pretty sure saw a small owl close by (whether it was “the small owl” or just a small owl – I’ll leave to the experts). I had some breakfast to eat so was on the lookout for a bus shelter, but the school children were hanging around in them. So I pushed on until after 8 until I could find somewhere to sit down.

I got to Onsabruck just after 9:00, looks a nice city with Museums, about mining (I’m guessing), and had a good feel. I joined the queue in the station to buy a ticket, it was really slow. The lady in front of me asked me to save her place while she moved her car – the queue had not moved when she got back, oh how we laughed. I was very relaxed by the whole thing, with loads of time, unlike those around me.

Eventually it was my turn, and I found out you cannot book a bike on the day of travel on the IC (intercity direct train). I ended up with two tickets to go via Breman on the regional train – all the planning wasted! Got onto the platform early and the only bike. Then a guy with a bike and trailer, then about six old guys with electric bikes, and then two people in wheelchairs. I thought that was it, I might not get this train and was seeing more bicycles everywhere. Well when it came what a joy, I could not believe the massive space allocated to bicycles on these Regional trains. At least one whole lower deck – amazing, just thinking about getting my bike on at Liverpool Street Station a few days ago (seems a long time ago now).

After one easy change I was into Hamburg. I’d had trouble trying to find hotels that could securely store my bike, so decided to ask a the tourist hotel booking centre in the station. He just looked up hotels with garages, and offered me a good deal on a central hotel. This turned out to not be as secure as I would have liked, but I have good locks, it’s tucked away, in sight of the hotel door and hopefully the bike is not that attractive to thieves – fingers crossed. There’s definitely a market to get cycle friendly hotels noted somehow. After doing some laundry, and bringing a lot of the forest into the hotel room, I went for a walk around town.

There is loads of construction going on and looks to be booming if you look quick enough. But there clearly are big problems with homelessness. While on the train in, I saw small groups of people living next to the railway in tents or abandoned buildings, in the city is even more noticeable. It was much more visible than London. Anyway, I was starving so headed to a familiar face in a strange city – McDonald’s, and in my quest to try new food – had a Deutschland Burger. It was good, but I was expecting more from the city that invented the burger.

After some more walking, I was feeling shattered, maybe the level of sleep in the woods wasn’t too good. So I opted for an amazing help-yourself takeaway salad, a yogurt (there’s a story here – I’ve been craving yogurt and bought one in Lidl yesterday, but it didn’t make it to the site – it became lost on the road somewhere) and a beer. Then back to the hotel to watch 90 channels of dubbed German TV. I opted for Colombo, as you always know what he’s going to say.

Big lesson today is don’t worry about bikes and trains in Germany – I’m very impressed!