From Großensee I headed eastward along the L93 main road, and bought some breakfast at a gas station on the outskirts of the small town of Trittau. I continued east through the Hahnheide national forest, with nice wide paths.
I chose to take some smaller paths through the woods, but those turned out to be completely messed up by large forestry machinery, which made them very hard walk – and the paths were not correctly mapped either.
At the end I had to pull out my compass, and I finally found the small forest road I was looking for. On one hand, it is annoying when you loose your bearing, but on the other hand, those are also the parts you remember and puts you to test.
There is a lookout tower on the one of the hilltops in the forest, and I must have been very near it, but never saw it.
From then on, no further troubles, and I exited the forest north west and continued through farmland and the small villages of Koberg and Nusse. It was a long stretch, more or less straight ahead, only with a small patch of forest and the blossoming rapeseed fields for variation.
After a while, it went downhill, and I reached the Elbe – Lübeck channel which also happened to have a lock close to the bridge.
I was almost at the camping ground at Lankau now, but since I was in good time, I chose to turn right and approach the camping ground from south of Lankauer See.
There was no reception to check in, so I couldn’t just put my tent up and call it a day, but had to call the manager. There was no cellular signal down by the lake, so it was another tour uphill to the village of Lankau, where I finally met the manager.
She was very friendly though, and asked whether it was okay for me to share a parcel with another camper, who came in earlier that they. It was a regular, who didn’t know that the space was occupied. It is a rather small camping ground, and I believe it is mostly regular campers that stay for the entire season. Of course I didn’t mind and I had some good talks with my neighbour.
The facilities at the Campingplatz Schmidt are not too clean and rather old, but you can take a shower and it has the basics. Note that the website hasn’t been updated for a long time, but you can still contact them via it.
Just outside of the camping ground and to the right, one walks down to a small public swimming area at the lake. There’s was a few families having a break, and my feet enjoyed being dipped in the still spring cool lake water. I cooked some dinner on my Trangia, and had a good nights sleep.