Ah well, Vermeer went so well that a price had to be paid.

Today, Day 1 of Week 2 of Daisy’s 12-week odyssey around Germany and Northern Europe, saw us repairing two further rear punctures and having to hammer the arms of our Bob trailer straight after our heavy rear panniers knocked one side off the axle.

We were dead lucky neither to lose the trailer’s capacity to fix to the bike, and that the tandem axle was just bent, not broken.

And,insult and injury, the screen of our mightily expensive new Google Pixel 7 Pro smartphone, our main camera for this trip, decided to keel over and die, slowly and finally terminally, over the last two days of getting ever darker, so that tomorrow we head not for Essen but for a Google repair shop in Dusseldorf.

Good that we have time on our side, though sorry to Guenther and Irmgard that we’ll be pulling a day late into Menden.

Our biggest concern this evening (the afternoon also rained off so we’re luxuriating in a seriously lovely hotel in Wesel) is that our combined weight – two humans, four heavy Ortlieb panniers, two large barrel bags plus tent and handlebar bag – is more than Daisy can handle, full stop.

The next few days will tell, as it may be that not having cycled long distance since the Baltics in 2017 and the Danube in 2018, the rubber of our elderly inner tubes has perished and can’t take the pressure.

Brand new, top-quality German – and not Chinese or Sri Lankan, as those we’ve been using so far on this trip seem to be – inner tubes are top of the morning’s shopping list, then it’s further down along the Rhine to Dusseldorf – like Wesel, pretty much destroyed in the war and efficiently rebuilt.

Sadly, with the dead Pixel, I’ve lost some seriously interesting photographs of a working windmill (not the one above, a mighty beast on the path out of Amsterdam) and of the mothballed Kalkar nuclear plant, now rendered a theme park a la Alton Towers, and as the Germans say, gerammelt voll on today’s May 1st public holiday Monday.

After camping last night (Saturday,with special thanks to Rachel and Daniel our Warmshowers hosts, we were in Stroe) we didn’t join the crowds, and despite all the hiccups, managed 46km today, our seventh day cycling, to add to the 430km or so we’ve already got behind us.

So, as ever, some of the pix that survived the Pixel crash. With captions.