June 13, 2018

The weather today was very cool. I actually had to wear my long sleeved merino wool shirt and my puffy jacket while we wandered around the downtown of Wesel.

Renate’s apartment is very close to the downtown, we were able to walk everywhere.  We saw a lot of \”donkeys\” and asked in the Tourist Information office why they were located around the downtown.  She told us that the Burgermeister of Wesel is an esel – Wesel rhymes with Esel which means that the Mayor is a donkey.

Our rest days are not always restful. We always have things to do on our rest days. Today\’s list was long: get a sim card for the phone, get maps, hopefully get garmin fixed with the European maps downloaded, washing, upload blog and get food supplies and hopefully have time to enjoy the Town.

We had a semi-successful day. We got Aldi-talk for the phone, we were able to get “paper” maps of the Rhine route at least as far as Mainz, washing was done, I was able to upload the blogs and we were also able to get food for the next few days.  We also had a nice wander around the downtown of Wesel.

Beautiful old church

We  spotted this Star of David which recognized that there was a synagogue and Jewish school on the site. Which was located behind the church

This area was bombed extensively during WW2, and this whole area was destroyed.  The City Hall was rebuilt with the same frontage as the original, and inside the Tourist Information there is a glass floor where you can see the original foundation walls.  The original building was built in 1455. It took six years to reconstruct the front of the building which was started in 2007.  The stonework is worth 3.5 million euro. I have no ideas where they found the crafts men to recreate this frontage.

We arrived back at Renate\’s apartment and that is when things started to fall apart. 

There are strict rules on getting a sim card and data package in Europe. We filled in all of the forms to get the process moving and we got the email to say the card had been activated. However, we cannot “unlock” the sim card to continue using the phone. We are not sure if this means that our Canadian phone will not work in Europe or there is some other problem.

Renate tried to assist us, but without much luck. Tomorrow we go back to Aldi and hopefully we will have a phone for the rest of Germany and data through the rest of the countries.

Garmin continues not too download the maps that we purchased in Canada. It makes life so much easier when we have maps to follow on the garmin it helps us search for campsites, or places to eat. Paper maps will have to suffice. We can use maps.me on the ipad, but hopefully we will have the phone set up and we can use maps.me on the phone. I have a phone holder on my bike and we will be able to see that much easier than having to get the ipad out of the bag every time we need to check the route.

Although we should be able to follow the signs for Eurovelo 15 down the Rhine quite easily – I say confidently, forever the optimist.

We spent the evening chatting with family and were in bed by 10:30. An early start tomorrow as we are hoping to get to Dusseldorf.