Elon Musk, Armin Laschet and "Hello, Lusatia" [Part 8]
Another stage after the Rostock-Berlin ride takes me to the new Tesla site in Grünheide, where I happen to cross paths with Elon Musk and Armin Laschet - from there I continue on to Lusatia.
The morning after
After nine hours of sleep in the federal capital, I got back to packing up my things, loading the bike, and setting off again - without the muscle soreness everyone had expected - for one last tour into Lusatia, where my journey would come to an end for the time being.
But before this final tour really got going, I wanted to spend a little more time in Berlin, since I was already in the city after all.
So I spent the morning in Treptower Park, with a short detour to the Soviet War Memorial in Treptow.
Off to Grünheide!
After the lovely - and compared to the previous day, remarkably relaxed - morning, I continued on to Grünheide, where I wanted to take a closer look at the Tesla factory, having previously only been able to imagine its size from the hundreds of articles describing it.
The route took me out of the heart of Berlin through Plänterwald, through Köpenick, then briefly along the A10 and on to Grünheide (Mark), where after less than two hours and 36.6 tour kilometers I reached the Tesla factory, where I was confronted with a larger crowd of people.
Without having planned it beforehand or knowing about it in any way, I had chosen exactly the day for my visit to the site on which Elon Musk and Armin Laschet (for those who have by now completely erased the name from their memory: Armin Laschet was the CDU's candidate for chancellor in the 2021 federal election and probably the greatest possible miscast imaginable) visited the new Tesla factory in Grünheide visited.
That was why a larger group of demonstrators, mostly residents of Grünheide, had gathered around the access roads to the site. I rode my fully loaded bike along the demonstrators until I was standing right by the fence of the huge area. From there I was able to get a pretty good overview of the site, which I also wanted to capture from another angle with my drone. So I moved to a safe distance from the site, far away from the crowd, and sent my drone up. For legal reasons, I made sure to fly my drone only over construction land that was still publicly accessible, in order to avoid possible no-fly zones.
Above all, the flight produced a huge panorama, which you can admire nicely with my embedded panorama viewer:
The panorama is more than 140 megabytes in full size large (and that's already with JPG compression; the TIFF is around one gigabyte) and consists of 21 RAW photos, which I stitched into a panorama in Lightroom and then uploaded to the panorama page; however, not all browsers can display it.
Next stop: Cottbus
After the detour to Grünheide, I boarded a regional train toward Cottbus so I wouldn't have to ride the entire stretch through Lusatia that day. I already knew that route, and another 110 kilometers wasn't that important to me, especially since people were already waiting for me in Forst, the destination of my journey.
After almost 1.5 hours of travel, I arrived in Cottbus - the last checkpoint of my journey before the destination.
Déjà vu in Lusatia
After Cottbus, there were fewer than 30 kilometers left to ride to my destination. After just a few minutes I left Cottbus and rode along a beautiful park toward my destination. I noticed that all of a sudden the signposts became bilingual - alongside German, the place names were now also given in Polish.
After Cottbus, already mentally finished with the tour, I got a complete repeat of the landscapes I had ridden through in the previous seven days over the final 14 kilometers of the journey: first through a small village, then onto a forest path and once again cross-country through the woods - including spinning tires because of the lack of grip on the sandy ground and lots of tall plants. After that, onto a wonderful bike path along the southern bypass and onward toward Forst.
Back Next
On the final kilometers, I still had to cross (pushing the bike) a large meadow that Google Maps had saved as a bike path.
Once that was done, I had finally arrived at my destination; after two hours of travel for less than 30 kilometers (thanks, forest!), I finally met up with my family in Forst on the evening of August 13, 2021, after eight days, seven nights, and around 1,000 kilometers on the bike.
Once I had arrived, I unloaded my bike one (for the time being) last time, and after showering and changing clothes, I was able to enjoy a great dinner.
