Today was a long hard day. It wasn't hard because of the distance as it was only a kilometre or two longer than our other long days, it was more that today's route was mostly alongside busy roads and most of it on hard surfaces, hardly any soft tracks, and much of it through built up areas.
It was sunny for most of the day, only clouding over towards the end, but still quite cool.
We met Heinrich at 7.30 this morning as arranged, handed him the key to the Dorfgemeinschaftshaus, then he walked us out of Rietze, past his house where he said Dagmar was still sleeping, gave us both a hug goodbye, wished us a Guten Weg and waved us off.
Rietze is a beautiful village and Heinrich was a true route angel.
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| Heinrich's house. |
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| Heinrich's grandfather's wagon. |
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| On Heinrich's shed wall: 3 million steps to Rome. |
Two or three kilometres after Rietze we stopped at a bakery in Wipshausen, a reasonable sized village, and bought a couple of fruit buns and filled rolls to have along the way.
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| The bakery in Wipshausen. |
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| The church in Wipshausen. |
All the churches we saw today were Evangelical Lutheran churches, and all but one was locked.
Some of the prettiest part of today's walk was just after Wipshausen.
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| A large insect hotel. |
We decided to have short breaks when we could to break up the day. At Harvesse, the next village, we stopped to eat our fruit buns. Opposite our stop place was this lovely church.
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| Martin-Luther Kirche. |
There were many of these trees in Harvesse. We've seen so many over the last few days, their flowers are like little rosebuds. I've never seen them before. There were quite a few in Rietze and I asked Heinrich what they are but he said he didn't know and told me to ask Google!
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| A close up of the flowers. |
Our next stop was about half way through today's walk when we called into a supermarket at Wendeburg, a biggish spread out town, for a hot chocolate and toilet stop, then on to Bortfeld, a small village, where we had ate our filled rolls.
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| In Bortfeld. |
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| We've seen many beautiful wisteria in flower. |
When we were leaving Wietzendorf a few days ago our host, Christa Herder-Euhus, told us to go immer geradeaus, always straight on. So many times after that we've had sections where we have had to go immer geradeaus, and we certainly had many sections like that today - immer geradeaus:
And many of the long straight sections were several kilometres long. It seemed to take forever to reach the other end, especially towards the end of our day's walk.
Our day finished with a 7 kilometre slog through suburban Braunschweig to where we're staying.
We followed the Jakobsweg for some of the way in and came across a small church with a sign out the front announcing it was a pilgrim church - admittedly it was for those walking to Santiago de Compostela, but we took it as a welcome for any pilgrim and went in and stamped our passports.
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| Pilger-kirche, pilgrim church. |
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| It's interior was very beautiful. |
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| Kreuz-kirche, Church of the Holy Cross, and Evangelical Lutheran church. |
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Nearly in the city centre.
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We haven't seen anything of the city centre yet, we're leaving that until tomorrow as we're having our first rest day.
Braunschweig or Brunswick is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany, north of the Harz Mountains at the farthest navigable point of the river Oker, which connects it to the North Sea via the rivers Aller and Weser. In 2024, it had a population of 272,417 and the metropolitan region had 1.66 million residents, the urban agglomeration of Braunschweig had an estimated population of 551,000 during the year 2024 and is the most diverse in Lower Saxony and one of the most in Germany, with almost 45% of its residents having a migration background.
