Hitzacker is a small town on an island in the Elbe, and it looks like a model of itself. The old centre is a tight cluster of half-timbered houses with carved beams and painted panels, grouped around a church and a handful of narrow streets, surrounded on all sides by water and meadow. The town sits in the Wendland, the far north-eastern corner of Lower Saxony, a region of quiet villages, forests and wide river plains.
The balcony of the title is the river terrace above the town, where you look out over the Elbe floodplain, a broad sweep of green meadows, with the river wandering through and the far bank low and blue. On a clear morning the mist lies in the hollows and the sun rises over the water, and it is a place to stop and breathe. The Elbe floods here from time to time, and the old houses are marked with the high-water lines from past years, some of them well above head height.
The Wendland has its own character, shaped by the Slavic people who lived here in the Middle Ages and left behind the round villages, called Rundlinge, in which the houses are arranged in a ring around a central green with a single entrance. Several survive near Hitzacker and Dannenberg, and the pattern is easy to see from the air. The area has also been a centre of protest and independent thinking, and the town hosts a well-known summer music festival.
The roads here are quiet, with long views, gentle bends, a good surface and almost no traffic outside the summer holidays. Riding along the dike, with the river on one side and fields on the other, is a pleasure. The sun can be strong, and wind from the west can blow across the open land.
With just over five thousand people, Hitzacker has a few cafes, a bakery and small shops, though fuel is not guaranteed in a town this small, and Dannenberg, seven kilometres away, is a larger town with more choice. Local fish and a plate of Wendland sausage are good for lunch. Spring and autumn are the best times, when the light is soft and the river is full of birds.