Bike Trip to Mueggelsee

The Grosser (Larger) Muegglesee on a Fine June Sunday Afternoon

On Sunday, Renate and I took a long bike trip from Charlottenburg to the Mueggelsee, a region of lakes in the southeastern part of the city with many small hotels, little restaurants, places to rent boats, and marinas where people can tie up their boats. Our friends Henry and Jean were there the week before on the recommendation of Stefan, another friend and co-worker, and Henry told me about it. It sounded pretty cool, so I planned out a trip and Renate agreed to go. The biking part of the trip was about 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, longer than we've done before but no part of it was particularly difficult because Berlin is so flat.

The first part of the trip led through the gigantic park Tiergarten that lies between Charlottenburg and Mitte, the part of the city where all the government buildings are located. We crossed the Spree and headed down the bike path through the heart of the city on the north side of the river. A few weeks ago, asTown Mouse reports on here, we took a boat tour of Berlin on the Spree, but bicycling along the river gave us more involvement in the landscape.

For example, just northwest of where the Landwehr Kanal branches off of the Spree, we biked past the East Side Gallery. This is the longest stretch of the old Berlin Wall still standing, and it now serves as a canvas for graffiti artists, on both sides of the wall rather than just the west facing side as was the case during the Cold War. I got a couple of pictures of cool art. Here's one of a fantasy landscape with a princess in front:

 And here's one with some writing in German (key parts unfortunately cut off due to my lack of skill as a cell phone photographer):

 It says "Politics is the continuance of war by other means" which is a quote from Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general who died in 1831.

This one was done by an American artist from Denver, Colorado, and promotes diversity:

And finally, a selfie with my bike helmet on and an American flag growing out of my head:

I still haven't gotten that selfie style down, I think the problem is I'm lacking the right gear, namely a selfie stick.

We had a lot of problems with traffic around the East Side Gallery. On Saturday was a tournament soccer game between Barcelona and and Italian team and the town was packed with people for the game. On Sunday, lots of them came to view the East Side Gallery, and there were cars parking in the bike lane and turning in front of us. But we managed to negotiate the traffic just fine. Southeast of the East Side Gallery, I took this picture of a beautiful pink Art Nouveau house front:

 We crossed under Oberbaum bridge, which I wrote about here, and after pedalling along for a while, we realized that the landscape had changed. Suddenly there were no industrial buildings along the river but rather beautiful homes. We had stumbled onto the Rummelsberger Peninsula. Somewhat different from Peninsula in the Bay Area, this one is between the Spree proper and the Rummelsberger See, a small lake. The village was quite delightful, with a village church dating from the 1400's. But we needed to cross over the peninsula and start back up to the mainland because otherwise we would end up at the tip with no way forward.

The other side of the peninsula turned out to be quite different. Instead of high end condos and homes, there was a collection of scruffy house boats, including one with a sign on it promoting anarchy where this poor stuffed panda was hanging out to dry:

Seening this panda was kind of synchronistic, because just the day before we had seen an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History about pandas, and it had a collection of stuffed pandas, taxidermy being a specialty of the museum.

After another hour or so, pedaling through industrial regions, we finally made it to where the tunnel under the Spree leads to the south side of the Mueggelsee. We topped on the north side at the Weissen Villa (White Villa) for lunch. The food was pretty good, but we especially enjoyed it since we were hungry from bike riding. Then we tackled the tunnel.

It was difficult, there was no bike ramp, just a couple of narrow concrete ramps on both sides of four runs of stairs. But we managed, and here you can see Renate on the south side of the tunnel:

The trip along the south side of the lake was quite idyllic, through forests, but the bike path was a regular freeway, with people zooming by in both directions.

About halfway around the lake, we took the Hotel Mueggelsee exit and checked out the hotel. A private ferry left from the dock and was just coming in, but it looked like it took its time touring the lake, so we continued on the path that led directly along the lake shore. The pavement was deteriorated, so there was far less traffic. Eventually we came to Mueggelhort, where the public ferry landing was located only to find that the ferry had just left. We debated waiting for an hour and having some coffee and cake, but since we were still full from lunch we decided to continue to the footbridge that lead to Rahnsdorf on the other side of the Alterspree Arm.

We reached the bridge after about another half hour, then continued on the Wilhelmshagen S-Bahn station, where we were planning on taking the S-Bahn back to Charlottenburg. But when we got there, we found that the S-Bahn service had been suspended for the weekend to Wilhelmshagen and Rahnsdorf, the next station up the line. We had just turned around and prepared ourselves for another 10 kilometers of biking to the Friedrickshagen station, when a bus pulled up with a sign on it saying "Replacement S Bahn Service". The bus driver agreed to let us on.

Breathing a sigh of relief, we loaded our bikes onto the bus and made our way, with bus and train, back to Charlottenburg.