Daisy2, remembering Daisy1 ‘s 240km one-day dash through old GDR in ’79, tracks the Wall’s course as we leave Berlin

Long-distance tandeming and blogging as we go is a strange old experience.

There are two continuing conversations.

One is for real and delightfully constant with Her Stoker Ladyship on the back (Stoker is what serious tandem riders call the rear partner).

Tandeming is after all a VERY sociable thing to do (though they do say that riding a tandem will propel a relationship ever faster and further on the journey it is already travelling… Ours now thankfully in an entirely positive direction.)

The other continuing conversation is a quieter one, with you dear reader, with so many observations and thoughts that want to be shared, only a fraction of which find their way into the blog every couple of days.

Now pretty much half way through our three-month tour (map shows the story so far, heading ever closer towards the 2500km mark), much of that thinking, I have to acknowledge, has to do with Ukraine, and Russia’s truly shameful post-WW2 legacy in Eastern Europe, together with Jutta’s and my visceral pleasure that East Germany is no more.

But these past two days, without going into details, there’s also been magic on the friends and family front, as we’ve stayed with my very old friend from 1971 student days in Leipzig, Barb, with East Berlin Cathedral Choir friends Anne and husband Thomas, and with Jutta’s brother Jochen and our German/South African sister-in-law Lydia.

Warm, deep conversations knitting together decades of story, as we also took the opportunity to revisit the West Berlin cemetery where Jutta’s mother’s ashes were buried, neatly in a row as the Germans do this, after her death almost exactly two years ago, just four weeks and a day after my (Mark’s) mother also died at the same age of 93.

Sadly, with Covid raging at the time, Jutta wasn’t able to travel to Berlin to attend that funeral in person.

So this visit has offered space to talk things through and tie up important family loose ends – and also to have two more very special days of cycling around Berlin and now out West into the Brandenburg landscape of lakes, forests and sky.

A poignant moment today saw us revisiting on Daisy2 the Staaken border crossing where 44 years ago Jutta and I, with our journalist friend Volker Skierka (revisited a couple of weeks ago in Hamburg) cycled, with us on Daisy 1 and Volker on a single, in 16 hours from sunrise to sunset and with absolutely no training, the 240 kilometers between West Berlin and West Germany on the only transit route where bikes were then allowed.

The route of the old Wall south from Staaken – indeed, its course all around Berlin – is now a well-tended, joined-up and well-used cycle route, with one spot showing how the wall was built, and the fences that marked out the thick band of no-man’s land that once separated West Berlin from surrounding East Germany.

One might expect that, with all this pedalling and even with help from our Pendix motor, we would both be losing weight.

I couldn’t possibly, wouldn’t indeed dare, comment about Jutta’s lovely form.

But as readers might observe from the next set of photos, the writer’s midriff is definitely not contracting, as caught in the light atop the 19th Century Citadel in West Berlin’s westernmost Spandau district.

To conclude today’s musings, Daisy found herself negotiating some very interesting stairs on the way to Potsdam’s Cecilienhof this afternoon, where US, UK and USSR as victor powers in World War Two signed the 1945 agreements that divided Germany and locked in, for nearly half a century, Soviet control of Eastern Europe.

Tomorrow, Saturday, we aim for Magdeburg, on the Elbe just short of the old border with formerly Western Germany, whence our route takes us South through the half-timbered fairytales of Quedlinburg, Wernigerode and Nordhausen, last visited on Daisy1 in 1978 and expecting to find them richly restored after 40 years of criminal neglect in GDR times.