| Today was our last day on the Island of Fehmarn. After
breakfast, we started the complicated process of packing our purchases into our
luggage. Luckily, we had purchased another carry-on bag for John. His original
carry-on was too large and he got it taken away and checked by the Lufthansa
personnel on the flight from Hamburg to London. There was no way he wanted to
let his computer out of his sight on the return trip to America. All our
photographs and his research that was done at 3 locations and the current
Fehmarn database were in this computer now. All the benefits of this trip would
be lost if the airline lost this one piece of luggage.
Shortly after 9 am, after said our thank-you's to Achim Kühl for his nice accommodations and we drove off to the Burg Church for one last visit. We took a few more photographs there and also at the Landkirchen Church. I also got a short movie clip of the house of our ancestors on Suderstraße in Burg. This was the house that our Great-Grandmother grew up in, before coming to America.
Around 9:30 am, we drove over the Fehmarnsund Bridge for the last time. Yesterday's rain brought in cool, very windy weather and the wind was blowing very strong as we crossed the bridge. According to our car, the temperature outside was 16 degrees Celsius or 60 degrees Fahrenheit, very cool for this Florida gal. We exited the highway at Heiligenhafen to find their cemetery. Last year we went to one of their 2 cemeteries and this year we wanted to see the other one. After much driving, checking maps and looking thru bushes, we found the cemetery. We found it to be hidden from the main road and neglected to a certain degree. It was a very large cemetery, but with fewer headstones than others we had seen. It covered a large plot of land, and the headstones were arranged in small groupings scattered here and there…… so we had to do a bit of walking.
Soon back on the highway, John was reading off the names of all the small villages in the area on the mainland around Fehmarn. He told me that he has people who e-mail him asking about ancestors from all these places. If he had his way, we would stop at every cemetery in every small village from Fehmarn to Hamburg. Only one more stop, as we exited the highway again to find the small village of Neukirchen, where John wanted to look in the cemetery for any Blößow's..... an ancestor of ours that he'd had no luck in locating. We found the church and the cemetery, so we stopped to take photos. John found some interesting headstones of Fehmarn names, but not the one he was looking for. By 12:30, we went looking for the highway and our way out of Neukirchen, but made a wrong turn. Finally, we found the 501 highway in Augustenhof after much criss-crossing of the countryside in the County of Oldenburg. Lucky for us..... We had a whole day to find Hamburg!!
Soon, we started seeing signs for the A-1, which is the Autobahn, and knew we were heading in the right direction. By now it was after 1 pm. And I was getting hungry for lunch. We had brought along some snacks that were leftover from our room, so we ate an odd assortment of salami, snack-sausages, pickled garlic and fresh cherries. This was far from the good German meals we had enjoyed for the past week. We exited the Autobahn onto the 432 towards Bad Segeberg and then on to Hamburg. Of course, we got lost a few more times with an occasional wrong turn here and there, but we eventually found our hotel in Hamburg. We only stay at the Kock's Hotel, because it is conveniently located next to the Hamburg Airport. You can always find the Airport, because of all the directional signs with pictures of airplanes on them. Thank goodness for those pictures! Early tomorrow morning, we fly out of Hamburg to Frankfort, and then on to our home in Miami, Florida. Our fifth trip to Fehmarn is over. As always, we loved the time we spent in Fehmarn, visiting with friends – old and new, doing more research for the benefit of this website and experiencing new adventures.
Auf Wiederschen Fehmarn
I
hope you have enjoyed my journal.
See
more of the pictures from our trip in Webshots.
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