The Sülfeld Lock raised us up its nine meters in a few minutes, and soon we were passing the entrance to the Elbe-Seitenkanal, where we came down from Lübeck, and were entering new territory.

The next day we stopped at Sehnde, the market town (village really) for a large area of farms, and a center of potash mining. We succeeded in finding an Edeka (a supermarket chain) and a bakery, so were well content.

When we reached the lock at Anderten (an eastern suburb of Hannover), however, the lockkeeper kept us waiting. When a commercial ship came by, we asked if we could lock through with her, and the keeper said yes, but told us the canal was closed from Anderten to the Hannover North Harbor.

The ship behind us, Leomar, improved the shining hour by touching up her paint, but we were concerned, because we were not where we expected to meet our guests. A few phone calls and a resourceful taxi driver solved the problem, however, and the taxi brought David and Mary Ellen along the towpath right to the boat.

It was 10:30 when we were through the lock and alongside, and around 16:00 we began to get intimations from the lock keeper that the canal would be opened any minute. When we got the word, at 16:20, the race was on. We were on the eastern end of the quays, and accelerate somewhat faster than the big commercial ships, so we were the second or third boat away. This proved a mixed blessing, however, because our mooring was (unknown to us) on our port side, which meant we had to cross a similar pent-up flood of boats coming the other direction, but we

It is probably safe to say that most Americans know Hannover only as the place King George III (King of England at the time of the Revolution) was Elector of, but Hannover is one of the largest cities in Germany, an important center since some time in the twelfth century, and the Kurfürst was a major prince. Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Hanoverian princes were the patrons of scholars and artists as diverse as Leibniz and Händel, and the Hannover area eventually became an independent kingdom.

We had a pleasant lunch at a cafe with outdoor tables, and in the late afternoon found the right bus stop and took our bus back through residential streets to the end of the line, next to our berth. After a swim, we rounded off the day with a good dinner at the floating restaurant (a former canal freight ship) berthed just behind us.

The next day was to be the day of the zoo (David has a particular fondness for zoos), and of the Herrenhausen Gardens, an extensive group of gardens surrounding the ducal and royal palace in Herrenhausen, formerly a separate village, but now part of Hannover. I had a different agenda, however, involving a train trip to Hamburg, so we went into the city together, but then went our separate ways.

This was all very well, but I eventually received an email from Wempe informing me that they no longer had the parts needed for an overhaul, which I found discouraging. I did not think the unit needed a complete overhaul, but I did think that cleaning would not do any harm. I also thought that there should have been no mystery as to the age of the unit, since they are all numbered and documented, and that this problem could have occurred to someone earlier; it is always a little saddening when old companies forget their base in pursuit of something that seems more glamorous.

Except for the occasion, this was not a problem, as I like train travel in Europe, and I am particularly fond of the great glass-roofed train sheds, filled with sleek trains to and from the ends of the earth, and the sound of the platform-masters' whistles, sending them on their way after stops that are often very brief.

We were always seeing huge shiploads of coal moving along the canal, and near Hannover we passed several large coal-fired power plants, one of them in Lohnde, just west of the center. They sported enormous coal piles, but were always scrupulously clean.

We stopped at a quay just north of Haste, a very small town surrounded by woods, originally populated by woodcutters and miners, but now, we think, mostly an exburb of Hannover. The day had turned sunny, and everyone went swimming in the clear canal water, making sure to stay near the bank when the commercial ships steamed past, pulling the canal water behind them. It was not at Haste, but at one point the ship Christine M passed us, pulling so much water behind her that the canal level briefly dropped eighteen inches.

At Minden the River Weser runs north through a gap in these hills; this strategically important location is no doubt the reason there has been a town on the site since at least the third century AD. Charlemagne established a bishopric at Minden around 800, and for many centuries the town was ruled by the church.

In the horse-trading that followed the end of the Thirty-Years' War (the Peace of Westphalia, 1648), Minden, like Hannover, was given to Prussia, which turned the town into a fortress. The fortifications were finally demolished by order of the new German Empire in 1873, but not before they had seriously slowed the development of the town.

At the Battle of Minden (1759), the Allied (Prussian and British) Forces defeated the French, which was important because it kept the Hannover area under British Rule and continued the British control of North America and India.

We were bound on westward, however, so we passed up the lock entrance and headed for the aquaduct that carries the canal over the river, passing under the gate that can shut the canal off if there is damage to the aquaduct, so the entire canal does not empty into the Weser.

A phone call to another Michael, the harbormaster of Minden Yacht Club, had assured me that there would be a berth for our nineteen meters, but as we entered their tight little harbor, I had some doubts. Michael indicated confidently, however, that we should proceed to the bottom of a U-shaped double row of slips. It was indeed tight, but Barbara has become good at getting around in tight places, and with a little rudder, a touch or two of power, a nudge or two with the bow-thruster, she was alongside without touching the boat of the worried owner astern of us, or anything else.

Not having enough bicycles to go around, however, we took the bus into town the next day and walked around the old part of town. Minden is divided, like Lauterbach, into a Lower Town, along the river (and doubtless prone to floods) and an Upper Town, where the old houses are fancier.

We had a very nice lunch at a table under some trees just outside the Alte Münze, the former Mint reputed to be the oldest stone building in Westphalia, now (somewhat improbably) a Greek restaurant. We do not know the demographics behind it, but there appears to be a thriving Greek restaurant or two in every town in Germany, even small places like Rühen.

At the end of the day, we stopped at a table outside the Yacht Club restaurant for a drink and decided to stay for the all-you-can-eat barbeque buffet, which turned out to be an excellent idea.

There are many thriving industrial concerns in Minden, with the Melitta coffee machine and filter company being only one example, but we had a sense that things are not all well, that the feeling of secure prosperity was somehow missing.

Perhaps the existence of long-outdated fortifications that absorbed so much space and constricted the city until the late nineteenth century is part of the reason, but Minden has a long history of internal conflict. The city did not succeed in prying itself loose from the control of its bishop until the late thirteenth century, and the Reformation in the late sixteenth century produced such conflict that the city gvernment had to be restructured.

Given the long history of unrest, often along religious lines, it is perhaps to be expected that the persecuton of Jewish inhabitants started earlier in Minden than in most other cities. The City Physician Robert Nussbaum, for example, was already under pressure in 1933, and in 1937 was charged by two of his coleagues with "insulting" them. Arrested and imprisoned in late 1937, he was never released and died in the Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen.

The Jewish population of Minden was essentially wiped out in teh early forties, deported, for the most part, to camps in the East. Today there are some 80 Stolpersteine in the Minden pavements as a memorial.

We look for Stolpersteine memorials in every town we come to, and usually find some, as there are approximately 50,000 markers placed so far (not all of them in Germany). Of these, there have been something like 700 cases of vandalism or removal. It is perhaps to be expected that five of these are in Minden, the Stolpersteine commemorating two generations of the Ingberg family.

They went off looking rested and happy, and we did a few little jobs on the boat, winkled ourselves out of our berth, and headed down the canal, on to the westward.