“​The bikes are winning... The bike are winning..."

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​Hamburg-Middelfart-Copanhaggen

 

As usual when camping we were up early, because we were cold, the ground was hard, in short we are not campers.  We opened the tent to find rain, rain and more rain, unfortunate.  However, I made coffee, took down the tent, rolled up the sleeping bags and opened the granola bars, Jonathan generally putts about and pretended to be doing something. I’ve yet to see what his blue jobs are…

Milo needs to stop every 150 miles or so and while looking at the map I found a town called Middelfart, having the maturity level of small children this of course was destined to be our lunch stop.  We had a lovely lunch of sandwiches and then went to look for gas.  On our stop we saw that small town “townies” are the same the world over.  Even in Denmark you’ve got boys who have finished high school driving around girls who are still in high school, driving laps of the same route in their small town playing hip hop with too much bass way too loud. And of course they had spinners on their sweet Vauxhall Nova/Chevy Cavaliers.

We rolled into Copenhagen fairly early after a very long and very beautiful bridge, and I, for one, was excited.  We were going to stay with my old flatmate from Shanghai, Christine, who left Shanghai about this time last year, so I was very happy to get to see her again and very grateful that her friend Helle offered us a room and bed in her flat, lucky us and a big thank you to both of them.

After giving us some curried fish from a can (no thank you sir), Christine took us off to see a bit of the city and find dinner.  She had been cycling all around the city to get us these bike and I’m not one to complain but… I don’t recommend public bikes in Copenhagen, it was difficult and my short legs could barely get over the midbar, this would nearly do me in later in the evening.

We found the only place open after 9 pm for dinner which was an American diner and Christine told us a bit about the city.  After dinner she and Helle took us to Christiania. Christiania is an old military base that was sort of taken over by a bunch of hippies in 1971, Denmark now recognizes it as a “free state”, they’re not subject to Danish laws, they don’t pay rent or taxes and marijuana is legal.  And by legal I mean it was laid out on a table by quality/country/bad ass name.  It was rolled, it was loose, it was in hash form, it was cooked into brownies. Well, all right then, party on Denmark. 

On the way home, after a good laugh, I could not get on my bike. I could not get on any of the three bikes.  Literally after a bicycle being pretty much my only mode of transportation for 5 years I could not get on any of them. Maybe the seats were too high, maybe the handle bars were too low, maybe I’m too short for Scandinavia, whatever the reason the bicycles won that night, by a landslide.

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