Back in Berlin. I raced along the Elbe feeling strong and exicted both about my beautiful tour of the north and about the prospect of heading south. I made the trip from Lübeck to Havelburg in 2 and half days. I had planned on four but I just felt like riding so I did. Across the north I didn't have too many long days. Though some were paticularly hot or tough, they weren't long. So it felt good to be back in the saddle and peddling. From Schwerin I went to the small town of Ratzeburg. It sits on an island- surrounded by lakes. At every approach to the town are fields of wheat and raps. Raps, I think is mainly grown for oil, gives birth to the plauge of rapskaefer. It's a small gnat-like bug that doesn't hurt, just bugs. Sometimes I roll through a cloud of them and 40 or so are stuck to my clothes and in my hair. They are a factor life in Ratzeburg as the people sit with their drink coasters covering their drinks and everyone constantly brushes rapskaefer from their clothes. But Ratzeburg is a cute little town with abundant ice cream and places to swim. Ratzeburg got me thinking about the towns and places I've been. It's funny now that this trip is 6 weeks over. I see it unfolding very much as I had planned. But there have been abundant surprises in the places that I've visited and I categorized themm thusly. Some places such as Güstrow and Schwerin were as good as I hoped. Stralsund and Ratzeburg were surprises- places I thought I go through on the way to somewhere else. I thought Lübeck would stand in the shadow of Hamburg. In fact Lübeck is a wonderful city and I stayed there longer instead of going to Hamburg at all. It's been great to be flexible. And I've been fortunate to be healthy and for the bike to be so tough. However, there is now a spot of bad and uncertain news. We plan and God laughs- yeh? Yea. The plan was to put my photos on the ipod and keep them all safe. Yea well the ipod has konked out for all uses except playing music. While I was trying to add a newset of photos I pressed the "stop and save" on the menu so that I could recharge the battery and that was evidently the death knell. Mt ipod has apparently eaten my first "roll" of photos. While I have hard time believing that they are actually deleted, I certainly can't access them. I'm far less infuriated now than I was when this all went down in Wittenberge. However, if in fact 145 pictures from Hesse are lost by no fault of my own but rather a 400 dollar piece of 4-month old technology then I shall declare Apple to be just as crap-ass as Microsoft, go read The Brave Cowboy again, and return to my old ways of distrusting faddish techno-crap. As for now I guess the best option is to find blank CDs and burn pictures onto them. Regardless Minda gets the big thank you today for sending two of her memory cards to borrow for this trip. At least then I can store a lot more photos before having deal with them. We'll see what happens. Well I'll likely be in Berlin for a few days and then I'll go south. Dresden, Weimar and then south Bayreuth, Bamberg, Nürnberg, Regensburg and then the Danube to Vienna. UPDATE!!! - Kenny came through with the big ipod help info. The reset code has worked and all of the photos returned. yee haww!!! Thanks Kenny.