Of Obelisks, Ice Cream and the Old Green Dawes
This ride took place in June 2021, just coming into the second summer of COVID-19 lockdowns. Living in Potsdam, Germany, the most draconian restriction (a non-essential travel limit of 15km from home) had recently been rescinded, but we were still prohibited from travelling outside our home state of Brandenburg, and overnight stays away from home for leisure purposes were banned too. To get a bit of a change of scenery, my wife and I had rented a car for a "staycation", so that we could cover a bigger radius from home than we could manage in a day's cycling, by driving to different start points.
By the last day of the staycation, Caroline's body was demanding a rest, so she sent me out on my own and I set myself a bit of a challenge: I'd planned what turned out to be my second-longest ride ever, after the 197km from Potsdam to Dresden in 2019. For today's ride, though - unlike that Dresden ride, which was done on a modern bike - I'd chosen to ride my classic 1981 Dawes Galaxy which, although it isn't set up to handle extremes of gradient, load or terrain, is still my favourite bike for sheer riding enjoyment. Call me a dinosaur if you like, or an incurable nostalgic, but I think you really can't beat the zing and spring of a Reynolds 531 steel frame!
During lockdown, Caroline and I had got quite into exploring our local area, and had become fascinated with the milestones and obelisks erected in the early 18th Century by the postal service of the Duchy of Saxony - see our first two rides exploring them, part 1 and part 2. Today's route was planned with the aim of "collecting" several more, with the help of this online map compiled by a real enthusiast.
The milestones come in a variety of different calibres, from the quarter-mile-stone, right up to the 4-metre obelisks erected at the major staging posts with an engraved list of all the available destinations. Ilmersdorf, my chosen start point, had a half-mile-stone - still quite an imposing piece of masonry (left-hand panel of the picture at the top) - as well as benefiting from a convenient free car park where I could leave the car all day.
I was on the road pretty much dead on 8am, aiming to make the most of the cool morning (16℃ when I started), as the day was forecast to be a scorcher. My route took me due south at first - through a stretch of forest where I was slightly nervous about wolves, having read a recent local news report about wolf activity in that area! - before arriving unscathed after ¾ hour at my first point of interest, which wasn't a milestone, but a nicely preserved wooden windmill just outside the village of Lebusa.
After a quick photo stop, another 15 minutes' ride brought me to the somewhat larger village of Hohenbucko, which besides the full-mile-stone (Ganzmeilensäule) - actually less imposing than the half-mile version at my start point - had a bakery, where I stopped to buy supplies. There was also a family walking their alpacas down the street on leads. You think you've seen everything? Come to Brandenburg!
Ramping up through the different grades of milestone, next up was a full-scale Postmeilensäule, in the small town of Doberlug-Kirchhain (extraordinary place names around here!). On the way, I passed another windmill, apparently recently reconstructed. I'd been going for a couple of hours by now and so it was time to raid my flask of coffee, along with a bun from the earlier bakery stop.
Those first three milestones in today's collection came for relatively little effort, but I had to double the distance to reach the fourth. This next stage of the route ran mostly on gravel tracks through a nice shady forest, which meant that I didn't really notice how the heat of the day was increasing, until I broke out into the adjoining industrial towns of Lauchhammer and Schwarzheide. Besides the uncomfortable heat - probably close to 30℃ by now - the utilitarian, austere architecture and general forbidding atmosphere put me very much ill at ease. Reading up later about the history of these places, I could tell why. It's a tale of environmental destruction from the exploitation of iron and lignite - first recorded in 1725, coincidentally just around the time that these postal obelisks were being erected; forced labour and atrocities during the Nazi era; and further oppression under the Communist DDR. Some of the lignite pits are now closed and being reclaimed as lakes - in a similar way to the ones a little bit further east from here, which I described on one of our earlier rides - and I sat down on a park bench overlooking one such lake to eat my packed lunch. In fact, I went very close to that earlier route today, without ever actually intersecting it.
After lunch, it wasn't far to the more elegant and less stressful surroundings of Ruhland - "Land of Rest"! - the southernmost point of my ride, where the Postmeilensäule is set in a spacious square surrounded by traditional buildings and also graced by a large fountain. This obelisk, by the way, is a replica of the original, which according to the inscription was removed in 1830 due to its state of disrepair.
Now for the toughest part of the day's ride, with 100km still to go, heading into the hottest part of the afternoon, turning NNE against the wind (which was mercifully quite light), and traversing a mainly industrial landscape with very little of either interest or shade. I was starting to run a bit low on drinking water, despite reserve supplies carried in my saddlebag. I took a couple of wrong turnings which I had to retrace, adding both to distance and frustration. Relief, or at least interruption, came in the form of an interesting mining monument with an old locomotive and some shade from the surrounding trees, and, not long afterwards, the small town of Altdöbern with its leafy Schlosspark and my next milestone.
I spent about half an hour in Altdöbern, taking a few photos and then just resting in the shade, summoning my strength for what would be the last hour of northward progress against the wind before turning westwards at the larger town of Calau, where I also planned to have a proper refreshment stop. (The strength-summoning obviously worked: I found myself on the Strava leaderboard on a 5km segment heading towards Calau - 8th fastest overall - which very rarely happens to me!)
Calau has a railway junction with an impressive surviving water tower, and - for some reason which I haven't been able to find out - chickens as a feature of the electricity junction box artwork, which is another thing I try to "collect" on my rides (junction boxes being somewhat more prevalent than postal obelisks!). What I did find out about Calau was that it was historically renowned for shoemaking excellence - also commemorated on the box art (bottom left) - as well as for punning jokes, which are supposedly still sometimes referred to in German as "Kalauer", although I've never heard that said in everyday speech, in several years of living in German-speaking countries.
From Calau station I still had 2km to go to the town centre - as noted on the bottom right of the above artworks! - the station allegedly having been built at a distance in order to keep away the low-life which the railway would inevitably attract! (There are plenty of other towns which applied the same principle, notably Cambridge.) Once I'd found and photographed the milestone - very much the most underwhelming of the day's haul, due to its low-key design and its awkward location beside a main road built along the line of the former town walls - my thoughts turned rapidly to the mandatory ice cream for the day! Caroline and I had decided that, as we were officially on holiday and eating ice cream is what one does on holiday, there had to be an ice cream stop on every one of our rides. Calau was a large enough town to have a choice of ice cream cafés and I'd arrived at the ideal time for it, 3.30pm, in the full heat of the afternoon. Today's flavour combo of choice was a scoop each of peanut butter and dark chocolate flavours, like a frozen Marathon bar (as I still remember calling them!). (Centre photo at the top of this article.) After the ice cream stop, I traversed the old town diametrically from east to west, and stopped on the way out to photograph a surviving part of the town walls which had managed to escape the highway builders.
Heading due west from Calau, my route took a gravel track through a forest which provided some welcome shade - and the wind was now behind, too! I'm not sure why I hadn't asked the ice cream café for a water bottle refill - maybe there was a queue which I didn't want to hold up - but my predicament was solved as I exited the forest into the village of Kleinbahren, where the road passed a cemetery and I was able to stop and get water from the tap provided for watering cans - Caroline's idea! Also at Kleinbahren was the surprising sight - right out here in the sticks - of a rather neglected-looking railway depot. I couldn't really tell whether it was a "museum railway" project in the early stages of restoration, or one that had been started but then abandoned. It looked quite sad, with no sign of any activity on this Saturday afternoon. Only the signal looked in any kind of reasonable shape!
Just after passing through Kleinbahren and its conjoined twin village of Grossbahren, I reached my next to last milestone (not counting the one back where I started) at a crossroads in the tiny hamlet of Dabern. This one was a half-mile-stone, more or less identical to that first one at Ilmersdorf, and it was set in a mini-park with a grassy area and a couple of benches. I sat down on one of them for another rest and a muesli-bar snack, and a conversation with a local lady, who was passing by with her bike and stopped to chat. I had only 40km to go now, or about 2hrs, so felt at last that the end was in sight, metaphorically at least.
My planned route from here took me via a trail running as straight as a ruler through the "Rochuser Heide" forest and nature reserve, which was both more direct than the roads skirting round the edge of it, and looked more fun. However, I wasn't sure, from the sketchy information I'd been able to find online while planning the route, what sort of state the trail would be in, or whether it was blocked by a military zone. So I asked the local whether that would be a good route to Dahme/Mark - the larger town where my last target milestone was located - and she said "oh ... wouldn't go that way if I were you", and proceeded to describe to me a lengthy alternative, mostly on main roads, presumably the way she would drive her car. I thanked her, and promptly ignored the advice; but I did feel a slight sense of trepidation as I started off up the trail - especially when the first part was very sandy and rutted. The forest section was 15km long, it was now 6pm, and if I ended up having to walk all or most of it, I'd probably be going until after nightfall, even with the long June day length. And what was that about wolves, again?
I needn't have worried. After a short distance, apparently churned up by logging vehicles, the trail settled down into dry, pleasant and easily rideable gravel - actually ideal for the "Stampede Pass" tyres I've got fitted to the Dawes, which are smooth, fast and very comfortable on tarmac and compacted gravel, but struggle a bit on looser or wetter surfaces. (For heavy roughstuff, I'd have brought one of my other bikes.) And I was delighted to find from the signage that I was on the "Alte Poststrasse", undoubtedly the exact road which the post coaches would have taken on their route from milestone to milestone, two centuries ago. What could have been more appropriate?
Back onto tarmac after a very peaceful ride through the forest, during which I didn't meet any other people - nor any wolves! - and with evening starting to draw in, I stopped to photograph one more picturesque windmill, before reaching Dahme/Mark and the last obelisk of this trip.
Just about on my last legs by this time, it was only another 6km back to the car, through country lanes which felt like a detour, but according to the map are no further than the "direct" main road option. After a final return visit to the Ilmersdorf half-mile-stone where it all started, I was back at the car after some 11½hrs, of which 9 hours were spent actually in the saddle. My apologies if this has been a long read; it was a long ride!
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