Hier, je suis arrivé à Copenhagen

A pleased bike rider meeting his host after a long ride

A bridge not too far - crossing to Fehmarn in the early morning

Approaching Rødbyhavn and Denmark whilst eating my buffet breakfast

Yes! It really is Denmark

I awoke very early as you do in a tent and, conscious of the need for serious distance and a ferry crossing, I left the camping ground at 6.30 am, my earliest start ever. Don´t worry, I had paid the bill the night before.

I crossed the bridge and the German island of Fehmarn by about 8.00 am and managed to get on a big Scanline ferry just before it departed. The ferry had a great buffet breakfast which I tucked into as I watched the small Danish port of Rødbyhavn approach (it is a 45 min trip).

With a good buffet breakfast under my belt and an added danish pastry tucked into my bag for later, I was first off the boat. It was then across the islands of Lolland and Falster and on to the main island of Zealand. Given that this is a Danish keyboard (that makes five different key boards so far) the actual name is Sjælland. This keyboard also allows me to type å so I will try to find and excuse to use this character as well. Just for the record, if you think you can speak good Danish, the Danes will test you with a word with ø in it. It is almost certain you will fail this test.

Zealand is a big island and I wanted to reach the home of my friends Baun (Buller) and Jette Christensen that night. To do this I cheated and accepted Baun´s offer to meet me in Køge which is within the Greater Copenhagen urban area. This still required riding 147 km that day, which is a record for me. Again I was assisted by strong tail winds and benign road and bike path conditions. Still, the more you ride the more breaks you need and the more sore a certain neck muscle gets. Needless to say, I was very glad to see Buller and Jette at Køge railway station.

Buller and I worked together in 1979 in Hong Kong and we are both water resources engineers. He works for a design and construct group called Kruger now owned by the French company Veolia. Jette is an accountant doing tax work as accountants are inclined to do.

As a reminder of the passing of time, Jette and Buller had two little girls in Hong Kong, Britt who was about 6 and Rie about 2. Britt is now a civil engineer with a PhD in groundwater and a baby boy and Rie has just graduated as a medical doctor and is pregnant.

The last ice age formed both the Schleswig-Holstein and Danish landscape of low undulating topography. The Danish islands have less undulation but enough to make it hard going late in the day when tiredness has set in.

Interestingly, I am seeing much the same crops as I first saw in France a month ago with the exception of what appears to be rye grass. Of course, Schleswig-Holstein has plenty of Schleswig-Holstein cows. Europe is one giant granary it would appear.

Denmark has almost no rivers and close to 100% of the water supply comes from groundwater. Convenient in that there is no need for storages, it is already stored in the ground.

It is amazing what a shower and dinner can do to revive the spirits. At 9.30 pm we watched the final of European Cup with Germany playing Spain. I put on the German scarf bought in Lubeck but like all my other adopted teams it, was the "kiss of death" as they lost 1-0 to Spain. I, and the entire German people can be consoled with the fact that Spain were clearly the best team of this European Cup.