On Friday, we didn't have any weekend plans except for a possible shopping trip to Poland on Sunday. Then my boy said he was free on Saturday as well, so within an hour we had booked a car and a hotel. We booked the car first because I thought I had found a hotel in Prerow for Saturday night. Turns out the website kept the "September" from a previous booking, so I was looking for a midweek hotel next month. When I entered the real dates, there was no availability. The Germans spend August on vacation, so it's hard to make last-minute plans like do. When my boy picked the car up 90 minutes after we booked it, they said they've never had a booking/pick up that quick.
We looked at the map of Germany's Baltic coast again and decided to go to Cuxhaven, which a coworker told me about a few weeks ago. It's a 450 km / 4 hour drive, so this trip was a bit crazy, but that's what life is for, right?
We booked a Golf to save money, but we got a BMW. Woohoo. We left a little before 8:00, so we expected to arrive near 12:00, but then our gps kept adding a delay - from 30 minutes to 71. I pulled out my phone and found an alternate route that avoided the autobahn. It probably only saved us 30 minutes, but at least we were moving the whole time.
And when we arrived in Cuxhaven, mother nature was against us.
It started to rain just as we arrived. The rain didn't last long, but the sky was still dark and rain was an obvious threat.
We got some Nutella crepes to eat while we walked to the beach.
The beach was almost empty. It would have been perfect except for the fact that it was too cold to actually want to rent a chair and sit down for a while.
We plan to go back to Cuxhaven because this little island can actually be walked to at low tide. it's only 14km away. Or we can take the lazy option and choose the horse-pulled carriage.
We drove to another beach with even darker clouds and a bunch of parasailers. When we had enough of the cold and the wind, we drove the 30 minutes to our hotel, a renovated building from 1747. We splurged a little on the hotel, because how can you not when it looks like this?
After checking in, we headed out again to look for a restaurant and see what was around the town. As always, I just picked points on the map and we drove out to them. We saw so many animals on the way.
But we couldn't find any restaurants. At all. None. So, we got a kebab plate, and then some ice cream.
We then drove to another point on the map with a view over the lake. As soon as we got out of the car it started to rain.
When we left the hotel in the morning we found a family of peacocks!
We had enjoyed driving through the countryside the day before so I charted a route to Hamburg that followed the water. It was quite fun to stop for the road to open to allow a sailboat to pass.
We stopped to investigate the ferry in Lühe, but decided to just keep driving to Hamburg.
And why did we go to Hamburg? We wanted hamburgers. We discovered this small chain of restaurants in Hanover, and with five or six locations in Hamburg, we needed to stop at one.
We had more traffic delays on the trip home, so we took more small roads, where we saw this guy. I don't even know what to say about him, but his car is awesome.
This was a really nice weekend, even with the rain at our actual destination. The best parts were when we got off the autobahn, so the road less traveled really is better.
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