Here we are, well into the last third of May, and every morning we remark on how cold it is! It’s particularly galling when we hear that the weather in the UK, by and large, has been warm and pleasant. Hrrumph!  I wonder what sort of weather they are experiencing in Newcastle, as that is the same latitude, more or less, that we are. It was at least sunny today but the wind was still quite fresh and had its’ usual cooling effect.

We were going to spend the day in Flensburg and so we did what we always do, go and find the Tourist Office for advice. The last thing that Julie said to me as we left the boat was ‘do you think the towels will be all right?’ to which I said ‘of course, they always are’ and we left our still damp shower towels to dry on the rails, as we always do. Incidentally, these towels are courtesy of friend Elaine, who when she knew we were looking for towels to dry the Guide Dogs we volunteer to look after, gave us these. Now these are so much better than our towels, we kept them and found some others instead for the dogs! Anyway, back to the Tourist Office where a friendly young man made some suggestions. One of them was to visit a road called Rote Strasse, which ‘is a historic city lane with five picturesque craftsmen and merchant courtyards’, which we duly did. We must confess to being somewhat disappointed, in that they had been so commercialized with nice little shops and cafes and restaurants that it was hard to picture them as they were. Dirty and smelly most probably.  That was it for the morning (it was a late start with bacon & egg breakfast) so back to the boat and some lunch, then a return visit. It was then that we discovered, to our horror, that Julie’s green towel, together with 5 green pegs (those of you who know Julie know that they would HAVE to be green pegs) had all disappeared! Theft or wind, we don’t know but we have our suspicions..

By now it was clouding over so we decided to tick off the cultural items and visit the two museums visible over the water from us, namely the City museum comprising two large buildings, the Hans-Christiansen and Heinrich Sauermann houses. Here we saw some marvelous interiors of houses taken from North Friesland farm houses by Heinrich Sauermann and whilst tiled walls and heavy furniture may not be to our modern taste, they illustrated the fact that the North Friesland farmers lived quite well. There was also a fairly extensive collection of paintings from the late 1900’s and early 20^th century, many of them nice but none of which made me want to photograph for future reference. In short, it was OK but we were not that inspired, plebs that we are.

Back to the boat, now in very cool conditions and with spitting rain. A few boats down from us is a Beneteau and the owners, an Australian couple, we found out, invited us for coffee tomorrow afternoon, so more about them tomorrow. Back on board I blogged whilst Julie read and made dinner and later, we watched a bit more catch up TV, this time Years & Years.