….. and my fascination for the Wattenmeer has not diminished.
Total distance walked on this day: 22 km.
My last Sunday in Eiderstedt ….,
Category Archives: A bump in the road Summer 2022
I could not leave without having paid a visit to our nextdoor neigbours …
The beach never looks the same two days in a row
Weather vastly improved, so off to the beach again for the afternoon.
The tide sometimes creates all sorts of patterns, different ones within a relatively small area.
Total distance walked: 15 km.
If you like Sankt Peter-Ording in weather like this …..
87 km per hour winds, and rain most of the time – the kind of weather which, according to the lady who came to clean my room, the locals call “stay-in-bed weather”.
Still, after a morning of exercises, and waiting a little while for the winds to subside, I ventured out, initially just to visit Kunsthaus Sankt Peter-Ording, currently with an exhibition of works by Armin Müller Stahl – one of my favourite German actors, so a man of several talents – in addition to their permanent collection (photo).
After that I kept walking, took time to study the shops along the way (bought a piece of clothing I had earlier sworn I did not need), and got as far as the bordwalk to the main beach. By the way, just where the boardwalk starts is an institution, I think, in Sankt Peter-Ording, GOSH frequented by locals, semi-locals, semi-tourist and tourists alike, all year round.
On the way back, I stopped for dinner in https://www.spo-fischhaus.de/ and had a delicious pasta with a load of giant shrimp and a hint of chili. I had previously tried a couple of their Fischbrötchen, and they were equally good.
Total distance walked: 13,5 km – not too bad for a (weather-wise) “stay-in-bed” day.
An afternoon in Tönning
More information on Tönning here.
I visited the Multimar Wattforum – a great place to learn more about the Wadden Sea.
Here is where I was. Total number of km walked that day: 12,
A slightly unsettling experience on the way back: The train that normally runs between Sankt Peter-Ording via Tönning to Husum is on weekdays replaced by Deutsche Bahn buses due to rail maintenance.
As I boarded the bus back from Tönning to Sankt Peter-Ording, the driver asked me where he should go from there. It turned out that he had not driven that route before – in fact had never been to the region – and therefore also did not know where he was supposed to stop to let people off and, more importantly, pick people up (at stops with no shelter, nowhere to sit, and an hour between buses …..). In addition, it was of course pitch dark by this time. And the bus was not equipped with a GPS (!!). Well done. Deutsche Bahn, for sending a driver out into, for him, completely uncharted territory.
WEEKEND!
No tortuous Rückenschule or gruelling aquafitness or whatever other workouts are on the programme during the week. Just kidding – I am enjoying all of it. But it is still nice that there is a difference between weekdays and weekends.
Time to move further afield, a change of scenery, perhaps a nice dinner somewhere …
After a misty morning, the day only got mistier, but nevertheless I spent time on the main beach in Bad SPO, made a decision to try to include people in my photographs – something I usually try to avoid. Came across an eccentric poser. I also visited Germany’s largest coastal-protection structure, found a lovely café in an unlikely place, and it was actually open!
I am finding it very frustrating how cafés and restaurants close for the winter without announcing it in any way, and they even leave the signposts pointing their way up all winter. And the German IT resistance again. Some places don’t even have a website, and those who do, can’t be bothered to update it with such silly, irrelevant bits of information like the fact they are closed for the next six months.
So after 17 km, and another eight to go on an almost empty stomach, and no other options around, I finally gave in and had one of the gorgeous cakes of which there are so many in this region.
Total distances walked: Saturday 17 km; Sunday 25 km -a post-surgery record for me. Sunday’s route on Mapmywalk here.
Giving humans a MUCH more prominent position:
Back to nature only:
In terms of plans for the future
I am dithering between wanting “The Big C” to take more of a back seat for me when I go home (except for the lifestyle-related anti-recurrence and anti-boneloss strategies, of course), or starting some sort of support system for young women with young children diagnosed with breast cancer, or any kind of cancer, for that matter, but breast cancer is what I hear about these days.
It seems to affect more and more young women, and even more and more women while they are pregnant. I have mentioned this before, but I find it mind-boggling. They then have the labour induced in week 36 so that they can start chemo as soon as possible (and chemo, by all accounts) is beyond awful, but my thoughts on that is for a future post). A newborn baby, perhaps a toddler at home, and crippling chemo (and of course therefore no breastfeeding). In what was supposed to be the best years of their life.
I simply can’t imagine how they cope and what that does to a young family.
IN PROGRESS
In-between walk
In between the morning gym class and the afternoon aquafitness training, I went on this walk, enjoying the last of the autumn colours. Still windswept. I made a pitstop for coffee in Café Siercks. (In a later post, I will list the cafés and restaurants I have been visiting and which – since they are still open in November – will presumably be open all winter).
Two weeks already
I can’t believe I have been here two weeks already. Time seems to fly by (and weirdly enough stand still at the same time), especially when the outdoors keeps calling my name each time I have at least two hours free of programme items.
My 70th birthday came and went. I had not felt like making any grand plans, in case a new variant, not to mention a new virus, would materialise and/or people got sick and unable or unwilling to travel and/or a new type of local lockdown so that everything had to be cancelled, or whatever. Then, at some point, the universe made the plans for me. Not what I would have envisaged, but I am very happy to be here.
Everything is well organised, and everybody is competent, super friendly and helpful and keep saying moin like in the part of southern Denmark my mother was from.
The various types of gymnastics and workouts, as well as the aquafitness, the massage (the Marnitz method – I must try to find a Marnitz therapist in Berlin), the walks in the fresh air – and when time permits even by the sea, the stillness and darkness at night – it is all doing me so much good, and I am already wondering how I will find the discipline to keep up this level of part activity/part zen back home, especially since I don’t want to go to any of the fitness centres in Berlin in this age of epi- and pandemics and people acting like it is the good old days.
There is of course always a couple of videos from Gabi Fastner plus a walk every day, so I guess the sum total of what I had gotten used to doing post-surgery, was not that much less than what I am doing here, only too far away from the sea 😊.
Also since the diagnosis, I have been studying the rising awareness of the effect of not only exercise but also of diet on attempts to avoid recurrence of hormone-positive forms of cancer such as the one I had, not to mention the importance of achieving and keeping a minimal body weight on the low end of the recommended BMI. Especially in light of the fact that I only take a very mild dose of the recommended hormone inhibitor, and then only half a tablet daily. (I hate what I read about the side effects and I get the feeling that nobody is totally certain of the extent of the positive effects).
Based on what I have learned, I had therefore started intermittent fasting, 16:8, and focusing on (sh..loads of) salads, vegetables, pulses, lentils, whole-grains, nuts and seeds, citrus fruits, very rarely meat, and then only fish and turkey, and NO added sugar and definitely no processed food – basically an anti-inflammatory, vegan diet (while still allowing myself a dinner out from time to time, throwing all caution to the winds, and even having a glass of wine on occasion, while words like dessert and cake have almost gone from my vocabulary now that I know to what extent sugar is like a cancer fertilizer).
In that light, I do not find the food here particularly healthy, although the mid-day, cooked meal is certainly good, fresh, well prepared, nicely presented, and very varied with at least one vegetarian option each day, and I shall certainly miss having all meals prepared and served to me, in addition to having all the exercise facilities so close at hand. But for now, I am happy to still have two weeks left here.
Anyway, it turns out not all the storks have left. Or perhaps this one was just stopping over from somewhere else.
How to turn a bad day into a good day: go and have a look at the sea
I belong to the dying-out demographic that has not destroyed my hearing by playing loud music directly into my ear canals. Therefore, it happens more and more often that I have to leave gym classes because the music is played much too ear-splittingly loud, and if noone else complains, the trainer is not inclined to turn it down.
It had to happen here too, so this morning, I was glad to have ordered a gym mat from amazon one of the first days – and that it was delivered within two days ….. This enabled Gabi Fastner to come to the rescue again-again-again so the morning was not completely wasted.
The only items on my afternoon programme were talks or lectures or seminars or whatever they were and I am increasingly skipping those. That sort of information is googlable so I prefer to be out walking and making the best of being near the sea.
I hopped on one of the local buses for the first time, in order to save time. As a very nice service, guests at the clinic – and, I assume, in the other reha clinics on the peninsula of which there are quite a few – can use the buses for free.
My walk on Mapmywalk here. My total for today was a little over 16 km.
I ended up having an absurdly early dinner, since the last bus returned to the clinic shortly after 18.00 hrs. Apparently, nobody goes out to dinner in winter in Sankt Peter-Ording :-). Next time, I think I will just walk the four-five km back to the clinic, although that would mostly be in total darkness, but better than having to eat dinner so early and so quickly.
By the way, I had dinner in Vietnamese restaurant Asia Mei (amazingly, they don’t seem to have a website) and will probably go again despite the relative blandness of the food (for want of more spicy options here). I remember also eating there a couple of times when I was here five years ago.
To the photos of the day: I finally seem to be getting the hang of the panorama function of my camera:
