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.

Lubeck - le jour dernier, ou est le soleil?

Grossenboden beach and bathing boxes - don´t think the ad is for ice cream

Dogs do it too

Gossenboden -sanitary heaven, ja!

Home away from home

Far from the madding crowd

I had intended leaving Lubeck early but it was raining so I took the opportunity to have a quick look at the City Museum, which contains some good 19th century German landscape work plus a lot of fine funiture coming from the homes of the rich merchants of the 17th to 19th century. Certainly beat riding in the rain.

Also bought some of the famous Lubecker marzipan (as endorsed by Bill Hansen) for my impending Danish hosts. I was reassured that the shop I found was the best marzipan store in Lubeck as the sales people were a bit on the snooty side al la Prue and Trude.

Leaving Lubeck about noon, I made the usual slow progress getting out of town. However, both the weather and pace picked up as I rode north across the very pretty rural rolling countryside of Holstein (Schleswig-Holstein). I was aided by very good bike path surfaces (indistinguishable from carpet in places) and a strong tail wind. I ended up doing 80 km in spite of the late start and pitched a tent in a "mega" campsite at Grossenbrode on the Baltic coast at the northern tip of mainland Germany. Only a small island and a ferry remained before Denmark.

The campsite and there are many others (I counted 42 on my map in just the area west of Keil and north of Lubeck) along this Baltic Coastline are mainly for what appears to be permanent or semi-permanent caravans and their "add ons". These add-ons include enclosed extensions, sheds, garden gnomes, flower beds and lawned or paved well equipped and provisioned (barbeques, etc) terraces.

At my campsite there are 520 such sites. Next to the amenities block there is a small patch of lawn for tents. That is okay because mine was the only tent that night and I was right next to the most important feature of the camping ground, the amenities block! This, by the way, was amazingly clean and modern in a packaged sort of way. It even had a dog wash facility.

I arrived on the first day of the German school holidays. The manager told me that he hoped the rather quiet camping ground would soon be abuzz as the people from the big Ruhr cities of Dusselldorf, Dortmund, etc, slowly made their way north to these "homes away from home".

Personally, I would rather be back in Dortmund with a good book than with all this intensity but, what would I know, as I don´t come from Dortmund. I wonder what Prue and who would think.

The intensity extends to a string of restaurants and bathing boxes along the nearby beach. I had a very nice fish meal with two good german beers in quiet and pleasant surroundings. Hopefully, for the campsite manager, this quietness will be vanquished within a day or so.

The Baltic Sea looked wonderfully clear and the sand very fine and white. I would imagine this area would not have much surf as the prevailing winds are westerly to this east facing coastline.

Oh, the sun did finally appear by the late afternoon.

Lübeck - la reine des port Hanseatic

Holsentor - the gateway to Lubeck

Marienkirch exterior

Marienkirch interior

Well that is what the guidebook says. Who am I to disagree. It is a pretty cool city. A lot of people get around on bikes here so it must have something.

Just to bore you briefly with a bit of history. Lübeck started out as a Slav settlement around the 11 th century but really hit it´s straps in the 13th to 15th centuries as a Hanseatic trading city linking northern and eastern Europe with western and southern Europe. It helped that it had a special remit and protection from the Emperor. One of the big items of trade was salt and the salt storehouses are directly opposite my hotel room. They called it white gold!

The city´s power waned with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. This probably protected all the marvellous architecture of the city in a bit of a time warp until the 2nd WW. In 1942 allied bombers firebombed the city. Perhaps to practice their skills for the later Dresden bombing. None of this was needed in a military sense and in my view was a disgrace.

Post war, a good proportion of the public buildings including the magnificent Marienkirch were reconstructed and, from the 60´s through to now, restoration of ordinary homes followed as well as sympathetic more modern construction. The result is a very attractive old city retaining it´s medieval street layout and surrounded by water.

I haven´t seen all I wanted to (the laundry is important too) but I have had a good taste of it. Marienkirch is a magnificent Gothic Cathedral of brick is probably the highlight but there are many other great buildings. (photos later).

Bill has said to try Lübeck marzipan but I forgot because I was obsessed about the laundry. I realise now that marzipan is more important than laundry. Sorry to rabbit on about the laundry.

Le Vélo et Le Train

This posting is about what makes travel so interesting, the unpredictability.

Approaching Lübeck and becoming less and less enamoured with German footpaths, I thought of catching a train from about 20 km out. At the large town I had intended to do this, I saw no sign to the Bahnhof, so I rode on.

A few miles further my front brakes failed which reinvigorated my train catching plan. I made for another station in a smaller town called Reinfeld where I also thought I might find a repair shop to look at the brakes. In the main street, my gaze fell on a fellow aged bike rider (photo to follow). He was not from this place but he kindly rode around with me asking several people the location of a bike shop. This done he returned to his friend and the coffee stop he had intended.

The problem proved simple to fix so I had time to go back and thank him again. Over a coffee which he bought, we discussed journeys, bikes and gear. They were within a day from home near Kiel after a tour around Germany.

The point of this story, is the proposition of what would have happened if this bike rider had not just "appeared" in my gaze.

Another similar event, the same day was at the train station. It was unmanned and the set of stairs making up the underpass to the central platform looked formidable. My mind was on abandoning the idea but decided to look for someone in this unmanned but formidable looking train station. I pressed a button and a man in lycra opened the door of what looked like a locker room. He told me in perfect English that the train would take a bike and unfortunately the stairs were the only access. He also said that there was a train to Lübeck in a few minutes.

With this encouragement and the adrenalin arising from the soon-to-arrive train, I managed the fully ladened bike down and up the set of underpass stairs to arrive the platform just as the train approached.

As I was about to board the train, I looked over to the station building and the man in lycra came out and we gave each other the thumbs up! Why was he there? I will never know, but there he was!

In ten minutes, I was in the centre of Lübeck and in another 30 minutes looking out onto this view ( photo later). This is the very comfortable Hotel Jensen in the heart of the old city.

Je suis arrivé à Lübeck - Les fatigues du voyage!

Since I left Roy at Zwartlois just north of Zwolle in Holland´s biblebelt (so Roy tells me), it seems a long time but that was only Sunday. In four days I rode 450 km and that is probably enough. Today I ended up close to Lübeck so it was easy to get here by lunchtime. Made easier because I took the train for the last 10 km! Just to see how it was.

Lubeck is a fantastic city but more on that in a later posting. Ironically, the hectic riding was aimed at avoiding cities, particularly the big one - Hamburg. I rode through northern Holland, Northwest Germany threading my way between the cities of Oldernburg, Bremen, Bremerhaven and Hamburg. Even the towns are a pain in Germany because they have labelled the footpaths bikepaths and they arn´t and they shake the hell out of my bike and me! Very wearing. Almost as bad as getting used to this German keyboard which has z where the y should be and vice versa.

However the countryside is great and on the smaller roads when I was "allowed" on the road I made good progress with generally tail winds and no rain. This area is fantastically rich agriculturally. I am planning a separate posting which will be labelled "La pastorale". I bet everyone is dying to read it. Yeh, whatever!

One of the reasons I felt so tired may have been that I camped on three of the four nights and sleep is difficult when the light doesn´t really go until 11 pm and it is light at 5.00 am. Some nights I can hear roosters at 4.00 am. The other night was at a Gasthaus which was interesting as no one spoke any English. However more on that later as i am planning a posting on accomodation. Yeh whatever! It was here I had the best breakfast I have had. More on this later as I am planning a posting on the best of this and that. Yeh, whatever!

After finding a nice hotel here, having a shower and lunch of asparagus soup (the Northern Europeans are big on asparagus and it is in season as I know from having camped on an asparagus farm) and English Breakfast tea (i am really a coffee man but tea is great for dehydration), the fatigue ebbed away enough for a quick wander. I think I am getting quite fit but still climbing the stairs of the main land mark the Holsentor, made me puff. Strange, I guess it is different muscles. Sophie, as a budding physio, what is your view?

I will stay two nights here just to rest up and because it is such a nice place. I also need to do some washing and it is really at the end of five socks and undies ration. Some may say too much info.

The AFL footy sounds miserable so I am no longer interested. The "World" game is the go. In Holland everyone was driving around with flags stuck to their cars (well not Roy) and now in Germany I see everyone drives round with flags stuck to their cars. Of course the Germans are still winning so in keeping with my position of being with the winner - Deutschland uber Europa!

These patterns suggest that whilst the buildings and landscape change across Europe, the people are doing the same things. That is, they drive around with flags stuck to their cars, they watch innane morning and daytime TV just as we do.

On Saturday, I will start the move north to Copenhagen which may not be reached until Monday. I am looking forward to this particularly catching up with my old and good Danish friends. But tomorrow is a layday.

I bet you have alway wanted to do the German ß - well there I can with this kezboard! Before zou laugh the y was deliberate! Oops.

L'Orange! C'est la debacle!

The Old Lower House of Parliament, The Hague


Mauritshuis - The girl with the pearl earring and I

Anke in front of the herring shop

Typical Street in The Hague

Saturday and old men in lycra relaxing after their cycling - it could be Melbourne

When in Holland do as the Dutch do!

Yesterday, my last at Renkum, we went to The Hague. This is the seat of government and where Roy grew up and in part so did Anke. It is a lovely city with trams reminding me a little of home. We visited some of their friends and spent time at the Mauritshuis Museum, drinking on the Plein (the Square) ending the trip with a nice Indonesian meal including Anke's brother Henk who was recently in Australia. Roy and Anke have very strong personal and professional bonds with Indonesia.

A great final day for me but not for the Dutch people whose team was beaten by a Guus Hiddink lead Russia in the quarter finals of the European Cup. Oh well, at least this house is philosophical about it.

Crossing the Rhine

Tomorrow, I head north into Protestant Europe. The Rhine is the boundary between Catholic and Protestant Europe and so from tomorrow I cannot expect anymore assistance from the numerous grottos to Jesus and Our Lady that have guided my from the roadsides all the way up to here.

To date I have been dividing responsibilities so that I look after keeping on the right hand side of the road and they look after my doing anything else that might be regarded as inappropriate or silly.

Perhaps, I should adopt the general Protestant viewpoint and take total responsibility for my actions. What a scary thought!