Großhansdorf - Lütjensee - Grönwohld - Sirksfelde - Sprenge - Großhansdorf

Not my best idea, cycling 42 km through almost shadowless rural Stormarn in an extreme summer heat wave. And here I was thinking I could escape the oven in the city, but even in the middle of nowhere out there in the country it was 38 C (that's 100.4 F for you non-metrics). And somehow they seem opposed to trees in this neck of the woods. In particular a place called Linau is almost entirely devoid of trees, not only along the roads, but people don't even have trees in their gardens.

Also, on the forest stretch between Grönwohld and Linau I ran afoul of one of the worst routings I ever got from Komoot since I've been doing this. One moment there was still a path, then I crossed a small rivulet (on a bridge, mind you, so you'd have expected the path to continue on the other side) and suddenly the world ended. There was not even a trace of a bikeable or even walkable path, just endless very soft muddy ground strewn with broken trees and branches and covered knee-high in vegetation. True, in some places there were tractor wheel marks, but you also would have needed a tractor to negotiate this ground. I fought my way through this for several kilometers, frequently dismounting to look for a bikeable path left or right, but never finding one, even though Komoot said I was in the right place and should have criss-crossed the mystery path in several places. I spent 45 min in this stupid forest before I found a way out, not without having crossed a stream on an improvised weir of loose branches, which kind of made me think I was in the right place, just not with a bike.