N 53.36032°, E 07.01881°
We've spent the day pottering very slowly through the many small coastal towns that feature within the Lower Saxon Wadden Sea National Park. Most of them have thriving ferry services that ply back and forth to the East Frisian Islands and they're all heavily jacked up for - and thronged with - tourists. Each and every town was brimming with cafes, restaurants, shops, campsites etc and all of the Frisian Island ferry terminals were buzzing.
Buzzing with German tourists that is. We seem to have stumbled upon a very popular domestic holiday destination and didn't see any non-German tourists all day. (Correction: Emma did see one Dutch car.)
The whole coastal area continues with the mudflats theme from yesterday and supports a huge amount of birdlife. Best sightings were a white-tailed eagle and what I think was a flock of little-ringed plovers: I couldn't get the bins on them long enough to be absolutely sure.
It's an area of windmills, arable and livestock farming, and hugely important coastal features; both natural and cultural. One really interesting cultural feature that we chanced upon was something called 'gedenkstätte seebestattung': a memorial area for people who (presumably) choose to have their ashes cast to the sea. The memorial is just a small boardwalk area over some intertidal marsh with some very high quality fixtures and fittings that has a series of pillars, on which are very small and neat plaques that give simply the name, dates of life and co-ordinates at sea of the person memorialised. It's all very civilised (pic).
Come the evening we've made do with a quiet dead end road to overnight (co-ordinates). It's not particularly pleasant but the whole area, being so touristy, has lots of formal campsites and stellplatz, plus a good number of informal scraps of ground where 'nests' of motorhomes are to be found. Some 'getting out of the way' was called for.
At least we're on our own and accompanied by the always-welcome sound of cicadas.
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