"A Holiday in the Lüneburger Heide"

This, dear Traveller, is my third and also my newest story, even though it has been written about a trip I made into this region in May 2007, but life somehow got in the way before this.

However, none of the information it contains is completely outdated, so anyone seeking information on the places mentioned in it, will find it and I sincerely hope that you will find this tale too very useful as well as a very enjoyable read!

This story covers:

Heide: Schneverdingen, Undeloh, Pietzmoor, Otterzentrum Hankensbüttel, Wildpark Lüneburger Heide, Wilsede, Niederhaverbeck, Bispingen, the „Greifvogel-Gehege-Bispingen and much, much more!

Hamburg: Oevelgönne, Alster, Speicherstadt.

It is again structured in days, 15 this time, and it is 63 A4 pages long, making it somewhat shorter than the previous two, which is why it will only cost £6 to buy.

Thank you very much for your interest and may you be inspired enough to travel into this region of Germany too and end up having as wonderful a time as I did!

Below are again a number of photos to hopefully whet your appetite: 

The Story 15 days, each day a chapter, on 63 A4 Pages. £6.00	Totengrund near Wilsede
A street in Niederhaverbeck	The church of St. Mary Magdalene in Undeloh
My Bed and Breakfast, Hof Eggersmühlen	Great Grey Owl Chick In the Wildpark Lüneburger Heide.
Tanja Askani with some of her European wolves In the Wildpark Lüneburger Heide.	An Arctic Wolves' Farewell In the Wildpark Lüneburger Heide.

An Excerpt: Part of Day One of my Holiday 

On my journey went, with mainly fields of cereal crops and forest on either side, until I came past a number of farmsteads and I suddenly found myself in the village of Wesseloh. Then I saw a sign to my accommodation for the next two weeks on my left. It was an ancient forester’s home that had, as my landlady told me later, at one time in history also been an inn on the then very busy road from Bremen to Hamburg that used to pass right in front of the house, with an adjacent water-mill that nowadays produces the electricity for the buildings on the premises, naturally using the water from the large millpond for this. The millpond was formed by damming the river Fintau at this point, where it is quite narrow and seems more a stream than a river, but this is because this is the upper part of its course.

I had chosen this place from the brochure I had been sent by the local tourist information a few years earlier. The image of a large red brick building typical for the area beside a large pond and surrounded by what seemed oak trees to me, the typical farmyard trees in Lower Saxony, planted there for protection against evil forces like the Rowan trees in Scotland, spoke to me of much tranquillity and remoteness, and this was precisely what I longed for very much at the time. I would, after all, have a car, so this circumstance would be no problem at all in this case.

And now I had arrived. The landlady was in the middle of mowing her very extensive lawns, which were unfortunately being ruined everywhere by little hills thrown up by a local community of cheeky moles, but this place was, after all, in the middle of nature, so as a home-owner one had little choice but to accept that, I suppose.

When I had lugged my quite heavy suitcase, which had already been slightly overweight for the plane too, up the stairs, because I was naturally not expecting another woman to carry that weight and there was no man to be seen, I began to make myself comfortable in my really very spacious double room. It was located beneath the sloping roof and the window was tilted to an open position because of the lovely warm weather that evening and this resulted in me very soon having a visitor in the form of a swallow!

Well, what a lovely welcome that was for me!

That is how it seemed to me, at any rate. She wasn’t in any panic whatsoever and instead waited patiently perched on top of the wardrobe until I had managed to secure the window in a still more open position for her and when I had moved aside, she swiftly flew outside again.

It turned out there was a kitchen for the guests’ use too on my floor, and the breakfast area was adjacent to it, so when I had finished with the unpacking, I prepared myself something to eat from what I had brought with me from home, as well as a tea to accompany the little meal, as I had also just in case brought along bags of several sorts of tea that I had become accustomed to drinking; especially flavoured green tea mixes, as I feel I have to drink green tea to prevent as well as I can contracting osteoporosis and I don’t like it much on its own or only with lemon.

After the meal, I saw how the sky suddenly opened up and the sun turned out to still be very high in the sky. Everything seemed to glow! So, I grabbed my camera – still of the old 35mm film sort, but with far too excellent a lens to simply be discarded – and went outside. The landlady was still mowing the lawn, which she always did with brief brakes in-between, whenever the fuel tank was empty again. Like this she didn’t tire herself too much.

I walked along the little side-road skirting this side of the pond’s edge and took a few pictures, first of the building and then another one across the pond. Then I continued on to the main road. I found I could walk back and forth on its surface in perfect peace and take a picture of the long, straight asphalt path down the green leaf-tunnel there. No bothersome vehicle disturbed me in all the time I took over this! I don’t know if I ever experienced that before…

Then I continued on a piece along a path opposite. It led me through yet another tunnel made of green foliage on high trees (mainly beeches in this case) and past what looked to me like a rhododendron plantation on my right. There seemed to be a great deal of these plants around this area. A number of them grew on the edge of the millpond, too, and even on a small island in the middle of it. Fuchsia-coloured ones were mainly in flower just then. The many blossoms glowed wonderfully in front of the dark background of the leaves.

A little further along, I reached a wheat field and I followed another path along its edge for a bit leading off the first one. Apart from a jay, who of course immediately alerted all other creatures in the vicinity of the presence of another one of those bothersome humans, and the odd blackbird and the like, I saw nothing else worth the mention. It wasn’t until I reached an area of bog bordering a conifer plantation that I saw a few frogs in the water that had drawn my attention with their loud croaks.

I decided then that I had better walk back, since one never knew what manner of dangerous creatures one could meet out there. There were sure to be wild boar about somewhere and in spring they are supposed to be especially dangerous, when they have their young with them.

When I arrived back at the B & B, I found my landlady sitting beneath the leafy canopy of the pergola that ran along the entire front of the building together with an elderly gentleman who had come to see her. They asked me to come and sit with them and like this we all chatted together for quite a while, until it became dark and the mosquitoes became too annoying. Yes, for it was already warm enough for these troublesome little folk and it was of course natural for them to be found particularly in the vicinity of a large pond.

While we had been sitting there chatting, there came a moment when I heard the honking of geese and then a group of seven or eight Grey Geese appeared from amongst the trees and flew across the pond, or rather the lake, as it was very large, and on another evening I was there to see them flying in too, along the course of the stream, across the dam, and they always went to roost for the night on an old branch lying above the surface of the lake. That was probably a fallen tree and it was one of the branches that emerged sufficiently from the water and far enough away from the pond’s edge for them to find an excellently safe roosting place for the night.

So, the first day of my holiday in the Lüneburger Heide” had drawn to a close in this truly romantic fashion and only a short time later I was already stretching out my so very weary limbs after that day’s journey on a magnificently comfortable latex mattress. These things really are a pure delight. I had already enjoyed such a base to my bed very much for a number of years in my previous home in Mallorca, whilst in Ireland I only had one of those nasty affairs with single springs inside them that were always digging into the part of my body that happened to be lying on them and were then very painful indeed and in order to avoid that, I always had to try and lie where there wasn’t one digging into me and that, as you might imagine, was not very pleasant at all.