Maurice wanted to visit Bremerhaven and after a visit to the fisherman’s harbour for lunch and to see the amazing array of seafood for sale we caught the bus to the centre and spent a few hours in the “Auswanderungs” museum which documented the emigration of Germans to all parts of the world. It focused mainly on the USA but Canada, Australia and South America also featured. It was very innovatingly set up with you being issued a boarding card with the name of two people and then you climbed the gangplank into the ship where you found information about the persons you became. It was thoroughly interesting and we really felt we were on a ship as much of the construction was from various ships. We stopped for the night south of Wilhelmshaven at a pretty and very well set up camping site on the Koenigsee a small lake. I wasn’t going to venture into the lake like one brave woman did.
The landscape in the north of Germany was very flat with vast tracts of crops of various kinds. This continued in Holland with many cows/sheep and horses grazing in the fields.
The weather for the previous two weeks was very changeable and very like Melbourne weather – four seasons in a day but at least it wasn’t really cold – around 19-25degrees. We had rain mainly at night and it didn’t stop us from any of our activities. The locals all said it was a lousy summer and unusual for the time of year. Seem to be a similar comment in the rest of the world too.
We happened upon a large Street Art competition and exhibition in Wilhelmshaven and the art gallery featured street art from Berlin which was quite interesting. We also bought a new Tom Tom as our old had had it. Many improvements had been made so it was a pleasure to use.
We travelled to Harlesiel on the North Sea and along the coast for a while and on to Nessmersiel where the tide was out. There was a string of islands off the coast of Germany and which continued along the Dutch coast. There was not a lot to see apart from the sheep grazing along the dyke.
We crossed the border into Holland the next morning on the 6th of August and drove down to Groningen which was an interesting town but being a Sunday morning the city was fairly empty. We had been recommended to go to Harlingen on the Waddenzee and were rewarded with seeing a lot of old Tall Ships coming into port after their racing weekend. The port was buzzing with people and there was a lot of traffic on the Afsluitdijk which crosses the inland sea and over to mainland Holland again.