SCHLEI FJORD - SLOWLY INTO 2018 - HELGA AND HEINI ON TOUR

Let’s kick-off the New Year! January has nearly past and it is time to start the travel season 2018. Before writing about our new plans in the upcoming articles, here a short experience report on how we slowly got into 2018 (yes, we know it’s been a while since then) and discovered the Schlei Fjord, a nice area of Northern Germany in between.

It all started with the usual question “What are we going to do on New Year's Eve?”. Spontaneously as always, we decided the second to last day in 2017 to go to a small guest house (Pension Tüxen) in a very small village named “Hasselberg” near the Schlei Fjord and near a beach at the Baltic coast of Germany. Our thoughts were like “Let’s enjoy the silence but also have some fun and a party at the beach”. But we did that without thinking about the typical grey and rainy weather here in Northern Germany.

We started our trip to the Schlei Fjord in Hamburg on the morning of the 31st of December. It was grey and raining all the time and Oliver's mood was constantly dropping. But as good Northern Germans, we were prepared for rain and had appropriate clothes with us: jackets, trousers, hats, and shoes were all waterproof – more or less.

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ECKERNFÖRDE

Our first stop was Eckernförde, which is a small town on the way to our destination. We explored the harbor and the little alleys of the town. Due to the weather, not too many people were outdoors, so we had the streets mostly for ourselves – that was very much in favor of Oliver, so he could shot empty alleys. If you like dark and wet alleys and moody skies, these shots are for you. 😉

KAPPELN BY NIGHT

Soaking wet, yes despite all the waterproof clothes, we continued our journey to our small pension in Hasselberg, got dry and then went straight on to the next town “Kappeln” to look for a nice restaurant for dinner. While strolling through the alleys of Kappeln (it stopped raining by now) we took only a few photos as we were hungry and also a bit afraid that we couldn’t get into any restaurant anymore – it was New Year's Eve and we thought everyone would go out for dinner. But we were wrong, the restaurants were not at all crowded and some were even closing doors before 22 o’clock.

Kappeln is a small harbor town in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It has roughly 10k inhabitants. It is known for its Kappelner Heringstage (Herrings Days), a large event in May.

NEW YEARS EVE AT THE SCHLEI FJORD

After having a nice dinner in a typical German small-town restaurant (The restaurant's name was “Am Hafen 19”), we made our way to the beach, to see where the party might be. To our disappointment, no one, really no one except us was at the beach.

Okay, the weather was dreadful, it was cold and windy and raining again. So we decided to go back to our guesthouse to see if there was something going on, after all, it was fully booked and had about 20 rooms… We were wrong again. No one there too and if they were celebrating in small groups in their apartments, silently, doors closed. What a bummer.

So we waited till 24 o’clock had a romantic toast on our balcony, watched a bit of firework and went straight to bed. Sounds lame, we know. But it could only get better was what we thought.

BEACH DAY AT SCHLEI FJORD

The first morning in 2018 was a totally different story. Right after breakfast, we headed to the beach, only to find a lot of people there, doing their first beach stroll in 2018. So did we. The sky was constantly changing between blue and sunny, then some dramatic sky, some light rainfall and then blue and grey again. It was just perfect, a nice and slow start in 2018. Best conditions for some nice photos and a long beach walk with even more interesting talks.

After a 3 hours walk at the beach, the weather returned to being grey and cold again, and you could feel that it would start raining again soon. So we thought it is time to go home. But before that, we wanted to do one last stop in the Fishermen village of Maasholm, at the corner of the Baltic sea and the Schlei Fjord.

MAASHOLM

We didn’t regret doing this stop. As you can see from the images we were rewarded with some very dramatic skies again, which led to some great photos. We explored Maasholm which has basically just about 4 streets and a surrounding harbor – when it started raining again. The only open café in the village was crowded with everyone trying to escape the starting rain, so we skipped coffee and went for our car to get home.

Overall we had some nice two days and we will definitely go back to Eckernförde and Maasholm and the whole Schlei Fjord when it is warmer and dryer to explore this beautiful part of Northern Germany a bit more.

I hope you enjoyed our little story. Now we have to prepare for our next trip, which will bring us to Andalucia in Spain, where we hope for better weather conditions and Judith will run the Seville marathon. Stay tuned.