Riding South of Copenhagen towards Germany

After 4 days, our cycling adventure has now well and truly started, to our greatest pleasure.

We left Copenhagen in the afternoon of a rainy and windy day. After an anxious night, we spent the morning mopping around at the injustice of having to either spend another day at our campground or ride away in the rain. Around lunchtime, we decided that rain or shine, we were out of there so we slowly packed up, rearranging our belongings into a new format, and made our way out in the early afternoon. We made a brief stop at the bike shop to fiddle one last time with a couple things, a slightly longer stop at Central where we posted a few things back to Nice and had a special McDonalds lunch on the station floor, closely guarding our precious bikes, before our real departure around 4pm. We hadn't planned to get very far that day but we just wanted to make a start after a week of preparation in Denmark's teeny tiny capital city. We rode for about 30 km, leaving Copenhagen behind, battling strong headwinds and in the end not getting that wet after all. We stopped for the night in a nice campground on the coast with the firm intention of making a slighty quicker start the next day.

The sky is blue and the sun is shining when we wake up. We continue along the coast, passing small harbour towns before turning back inland towards Koge through beautiful weat fields, coloured burnt orange by the sun and shaped by the sea breeze (still going North while we are trying to go South...). Danish farmers must be having a good year because the crops here are so full and thick. They look like big soft carpets the colour of Chris' hair. After another pretty short day (we are still warming up), we treat ourselves to a nice picnic dinner of rollmops (marinated herring), fatty brie, brown bread and a salad. Yum!

The next morning, the wind isn't quite so strong and we have a good long day riding about 75km. The scenery is just as beautiful, sometimes following the coast and sometimes riding between paddocks of weat, peas or corn bordered by bright red patches of coquelicots. We have our first stop in Rodvig, about 35km away, where we have some tasty danish pastries for morning coffee. After a nice break, we keep going and make it to Praesto, another coastal town which we approach from the top of a small hill giving us a beautiful vista of the town's harbour. We quickly find a campground and go for a short stroll in the old town's centre before having an early dinner and going straight to bed. The life of a cycle-tourist is pretty simple. Ride, eat, sleep and repeat. It's nice and liberating after what I found to be a frustrating experience of spending too long in European main cities where all we can do is look and never touch.

We expect to spend another couple days in Denmark, after which we will be catching a ferry to Germany where we will continue towards Berlin. The route we are taking seems to be quite popular and is certainly very well set up and marked all along the way. It doesn't mean we didn't take a few wrong turns here and there but so far, it is smooth sailing and as long as we manage to find pastries along the way, it should remain the case.