Day 38: ‘Easy’

Steve’s house, Copenhagen. Distance covered 128km.

Packed camp very quickly as i was the only person up at 5.30 and the mosquitoes found me pretty quickly. I gave better than I got but I was keen to be leaving so had a quick fried cheese (theme developing here) breakfast and was off!

The first 20km were easy riding and when I came to the old bridge to the next island, a rotting steel construction, I stopped for a peleton of maybe 30 riders mostly school age with a guy on the back riding the lowest handcycle I have ever seen. He had flags on it that there still lower than my hands…

When I got to Vordingborg it started raining lightly but I found an open bakery and had second breakfast and pretended it was the first. Got on the real-road and took the 151 all the way to Copenhagen.

Now on the map this road is practically a straight line and so I assumed that the terrain would be largely flat. This was an error. In fact the road was imposed on the landscape and crossed several ridges in a row at right angles. Hill repeats for about 50km basically. It was fairly brutal but I stopped halfway to Koge and had a good picnic lunch standing outside a supermarket in a hick town gulping down multi-grain rolls and ice latte watching the people shop. Last lunch like this was Asda outside Newcastle.

This one stood me in good stead and the second section of the road seemed to fly by and as I got closer to Copehagen it leveled out. You don’t know how easy it is to spend the afternoon cruising on the flat after a morning of Hill climbs. Every so often I would see a large truck full of teenagers being driven around and honking its horn. Turns out these are recent graduates and the whole class is going to each of their family houses in turn and getting drunk with their parents.

I felt in great shape as i approached town, but increasingly aware that I didn’t have a scooby where Steve’s house was. I had to find some internet, which was difficult, partly because there doesn’t seem to be many dedicated internet cafe’s and mostly because Copenhagen is so damm distracting! The temptation to just find a bar and watch the city was huge, but I really wanted to get the truck unloaded so asked a nice man if i could hijack his cafe’s wireless and use my few scant remaining seconds of battery (booting twice arrgh) to check my mail and get the address! woo! even had time to look at the map and mark down its vague location on my paper map. Sorted.

Thanked the nice man, back on the bike and into town and was almost immediately lost. However I found myself in the main square, that is also the main pitch and has bike taxis hanging around. In return for a handful of gumi-bears they pointed me in the right direction.

When I got here I found the door and was just thinking, now to find his buzzer when out pops a head from the ground floor window. ‘Think of the devil!’ Ace.

So hear I am with baby and Inga and Steve, feeling like a million dollars and a long shower, getting fed big hunks of meat and drinkin beer in Copenhagen. Feels great. Steve takes me on a wander in the evening and I marvel at how dark the city is, and how grand. As the darkness finally falls my calves start to seize up and I can no longer straighten my legs, I fall, to rest.