20th Anniversary European Bike Adventure: Day 9, Copenhagen and beyond
One sad thing about the way our trip was structured is that we didn't have a lot of time in a lot of places that we would have liked to have a lot more time.
Exhibit A: Copenhagen. We arrived in the morning on Saturday, stayed there Saturday night, and then departed Sunday late afternoon. I gotta say, though.. as I was reviewing photos and videos to write up this post for this day, I was pretty impressed with the number of things we managed to see in our short time there! Let's begin.
Sunday morning. We decided to skip breakfast.
HAHAHA! We all know that's not true. In fact, we were about to head out for a nice walk to breakfast, when Matt said, "No, wait, I found a place that's slightly further away, but much better!" And it was true.
The Laundromat Cafe. Evidently it really is a laundromat, but we were just there for breakfast. And to admire the amazing book display!
He also managed to find a thing on the menu that was basically "Every breakfast food ever made." It was amazing. I don't even remember what I got, because whatever it was, it couldn't compare to this.
Matt achieved Peak Breakfast.
After breakfast we headed back to Some Guy's Apartment and packed all our stuff back up. We had spread all our cycling clothes out around the apartment to dry after the laundromat, so we had to double and triple check all hooks, door knobs, and surfaces to make sure we weren't leaving any vital clothing behind.
We finally made it out the door just before our 11am checkout time, ready to haul all our stuff around Copenhagen all day before catching our 4:30pm ferry!
Our first stop was Fælledparken, just down the street from us. We'd ridden through part of it the day before, but decided it merited further investigation. It was lovely and very quiet on a Sunday afternoon.
As we meandered around wherever intrigued us, we saw a group of people gathered around a big building. That usually means there's something worth looking at, so we rode over to find out what was going on. And it was people in hats marching! It's always fun to accidentally see an interesting thing.
Rode past some random things.
There was a random pair of glasses on the statue's pedestal, so we found a home for them.
So pretty. So cobbly.
We made our way over to Christiania, which I had not heard of before, but which Matt explained, and wikipedia now lets me quote "is an intentional community and commune of about 850 to 1,000 residents, covering 7.7 hectares (19 acres) in the borough of Christianshavn in the Danish capital city of Copenhagen. Christiania has been a source of controversy since its creation in a squatted military area in 1971. Its cannabis trade was tolerated by authorities until 2004. Since then, relations between Christiania and Danish authorities have been strained. Since the beginning of the 2010s, the situation has been normalized and Danish law is now enforced in Christiania."
It's a very neat little artist community that smells heavily of pot, and where you're not allowed to take photos most places.
Local passerby offered to take a picture of us together. We don't have that many, and nearly none that weren't selfies, given how much time we spent together!
Bike rack made of.. bikes!
After we milled about there for a while, chatting about politics with locals (it was EU parliamentary election day in Denmark, hence all the political posters everywhere) and chatting about our bike tour with some fellow touring (via bus) Americans, we decided to go see if we could find a bar that a Swedish friend had mentioned with fondness so we could take a picture to send back to him.
For Emil.
We did find it, but we found it closed, so we snapped a picture, then decided to find a place to have lunch in the (schmancy) stripmall we'd just ridden through.
I don't remember when this happened, but LOOK AT THAT FACE.
Pretty much every restaurant had an outdoor seating area and a place to stow our bikes, so we chose one that was covered, because it had begun to sprinkle.
It actually worked out really well. It began to rain earnestly and sincerely as we ate, and then by the time we were done, it had cleared up again! We got to enjoy a lovely rain shower from the protection of our umbrella, while remaining dry.
After lunch we really had no other goals for things to see, so we decided to head toward the docks and see how early we were allowed to board our ferry.
We had a lovely ride through the city and over to the water, where Matt had us head out along a pier of sorts. And there was one of my favorite Arts from this trip!
She is officially named The Genetically Modified Little Mermaid, but we called her The Fucked Up Little Mermaid.
This sculpture was on land beside her, way up in the air, and was a little scary.
See?
Matt explained this art was derivative of another piece of art nearby, which we were going to not bother going to see. But we figured.. we're SO close to it, and who knows when we'll be back, so we headed over to Den Lille Havfrue. Which was COMPLETELY surrounded by tour buses and crowds of tourists. Matt stayed with the bikes while I went over to get a few photos and giggle at how crowded it was.
Look how beautiful and peaceful Den Lille Havfrue is.
Haha, just kidding! Everyone in the world is there gawking at her, on land and on boat!
Then we managed to extract ourselves from the area without being completely crushed by buses (though it was a close thing), and headed to the ferry.
This time we had no line to wait in to get our tickets, and we just rode straight onboard.
This ferry DID have a bike rack! We stripped our bikes down, loaded up our bags, and secured our bikes to the bike rack. There was one other guy stowing his bike, and I figured there was maybe room for 2 more bikes, if any other cyclists showed up.
We made our way to our room, which Matt had upgraded, and was enormous! I mean, I'm comparing it to our previous tiny ferry room, and the two tiny houses we'd recently stayed in, but still! So much room!
Unlike the last ferry, we had not reserved dinner tickets anywhere, so when we saw that this ferry actually had ROOM SERVICE, we were unable to resist. We had spent so much time dealing with people over the last week, and so much time eating in public, we just wanted to put on pajamas and kick our feet up and eat while staring out our window at the water.
He got lasagna. I got a club sandwich. And we got a cheese plate, because never say no to the cheese plate.
So we did. And we both got a strawberry cake thing that was both beautiful and delicious.
Part of our upgraded cabin was a minibar with some beers, so after dinner, we took our beers out to explore the ferry a bit. We'd not really had many daylight hours to explore our last ferry, so we wanted to actually do some touristing from this one.
Beers on a boat!
We meandered. I recorded a boatvlog, wherein we got in trouble with the authorities and Matt almost got us kicked off the boat.
And I attempted to watch the sunset, but THE SUN DOES NOT SET. I swear, I watched for like 20 hours (... approximately), but the sun NEVER GOT ANY LOWER.
Finally it got cloudy, and I decided I'd at least seen the prettiest part of the sunset, and we could watch the rest from our correctly-oriented cabin window.
So we headed back to the room, where it still wasn't dark, and went to sleep in Denmark.
Total miles for day 9: 12.29 miles tooling very, very slowly around Copenhagen.
Exhibit A: Copenhagen. We arrived in the morning on Saturday, stayed there Saturday night, and then departed Sunday late afternoon. I gotta say, though.. as I was reviewing photos and videos to write up this post for this day, I was pretty impressed with the number of things we managed to see in our short time there! Let's begin.
Sunday morning. We decided to skip breakfast.
HAHAHA! We all know that's not true. In fact, we were about to head out for a nice walk to breakfast, when Matt said, "No, wait, I found a place that's slightly further away, but much better!" And it was true.
The Laundromat Cafe. Evidently it really is a laundromat, but we were just there for breakfast. And to admire the amazing book display!
He also managed to find a thing on the menu that was basically "Every breakfast food ever made." It was amazing. I don't even remember what I got, because whatever it was, it couldn't compare to this.
Matt achieved Peak Breakfast.
After breakfast we headed back to Some Guy's Apartment and packed all our stuff back up. We had spread all our cycling clothes out around the apartment to dry after the laundromat, so we had to double and triple check all hooks, door knobs, and surfaces to make sure we weren't leaving any vital clothing behind.
We finally made it out the door just before our 11am checkout time, ready to haul all our stuff around Copenhagen all day before catching our 4:30pm ferry!
Our first stop was Fælledparken, just down the street from us. We'd ridden through part of it the day before, but decided it merited further investigation. It was lovely and very quiet on a Sunday afternoon.
As we meandered around wherever intrigued us, we saw a group of people gathered around a big building. That usually means there's something worth looking at, so we rode over to find out what was going on. And it was people in hats marching! It's always fun to accidentally see an interesting thing.
Click to viewRode past some random things.
There was a random pair of glasses on the statue's pedestal, so we found a home for them.
So pretty. So cobbly.
We made our way over to Christiania, which I had not heard of before, but which Matt explained, and wikipedia now lets me quote "is an intentional community and commune of about 850 to 1,000 residents, covering 7.7 hectares (19 acres) in the borough of Christianshavn in the Danish capital city of Copenhagen. Christiania has been a source of controversy since its creation in a squatted military area in 1971. Its cannabis trade was tolerated by authorities until 2004. Since then, relations between Christiania and Danish authorities have been strained. Since the beginning of the 2010s, the situation has been normalized and Danish law is now enforced in Christiania."
It's a very neat little artist community that smells heavily of pot, and where you're not allowed to take photos most places.
Local passerby offered to take a picture of us together. We don't have that many, and nearly none that weren't selfies, given how much time we spent together!
Bike rack made of.. bikes!
After we milled about there for a while, chatting about politics with locals (it was EU parliamentary election day in Denmark, hence all the political posters everywhere) and chatting about our bike tour with some fellow touring (via bus) Americans, we decided to go see if we could find a bar that a Swedish friend had mentioned with fondness so we could take a picture to send back to him.
For Emil.
We did find it, but we found it closed, so we snapped a picture, then decided to find a place to have lunch in the (schmancy) stripmall we'd just ridden through.
I don't remember when this happened, but LOOK AT THAT FACE.
Pretty much every restaurant had an outdoor seating area and a place to stow our bikes, so we chose one that was covered, because it had begun to sprinkle.
It actually worked out really well. It began to rain earnestly and sincerely as we ate, and then by the time we were done, it had cleared up again! We got to enjoy a lovely rain shower from the protection of our umbrella, while remaining dry.
After lunch we really had no other goals for things to see, so we decided to head toward the docks and see how early we were allowed to board our ferry.
We had a lovely ride through the city and over to the water, where Matt had us head out along a pier of sorts. And there was one of my favorite Arts from this trip!
She is officially named The Genetically Modified Little Mermaid, but we called her The Fucked Up Little Mermaid.
This sculpture was on land beside her, way up in the air, and was a little scary.
See?
Matt explained this art was derivative of another piece of art nearby, which we were going to not bother going to see. But we figured.. we're SO close to it, and who knows when we'll be back, so we headed over to Den Lille Havfrue. Which was COMPLETELY surrounded by tour buses and crowds of tourists. Matt stayed with the bikes while I went over to get a few photos and giggle at how crowded it was.
Look how beautiful and peaceful Den Lille Havfrue is.
Haha, just kidding! Everyone in the world is there gawking at her, on land and on boat!
Then we managed to extract ourselves from the area without being completely crushed by buses (though it was a close thing), and headed to the ferry.
This time we had no line to wait in to get our tickets, and we just rode straight onboard.
This ferry DID have a bike rack! We stripped our bikes down, loaded up our bags, and secured our bikes to the bike rack. There was one other guy stowing his bike, and I figured there was maybe room for 2 more bikes, if any other cyclists showed up.
We made our way to our room, which Matt had upgraded, and was enormous! I mean, I'm comparing it to our previous tiny ferry room, and the two tiny houses we'd recently stayed in, but still! So much room!
Unlike the last ferry, we had not reserved dinner tickets anywhere, so when we saw that this ferry actually had ROOM SERVICE, we were unable to resist. We had spent so much time dealing with people over the last week, and so much time eating in public, we just wanted to put on pajamas and kick our feet up and eat while staring out our window at the water.
He got lasagna. I got a club sandwich. And we got a cheese plate, because never say no to the cheese plate.
So we did. And we both got a strawberry cake thing that was both beautiful and delicious.
Part of our upgraded cabin was a minibar with some beers, so after dinner, we took our beers out to explore the ferry a bit. We'd not really had many daylight hours to explore our last ferry, so we wanted to actually do some touristing from this one.
Beers on a boat!
We meandered. I recorded a boatvlog, wherein we got in trouble with the authorities and Matt almost got us kicked off the boat.
And I attempted to watch the sunset, but THE SUN DOES NOT SET. I swear, I watched for like 20 hours (... approximately), but the sun NEVER GOT ANY LOWER.
Finally it got cloudy, and I decided I'd at least seen the prettiest part of the sunset, and we could watch the rest from our correctly-oriented cabin window.
So we headed back to the room, where it still wasn't dark, and went to sleep in Denmark.
Total miles for day 9: 12.29 miles tooling very, very slowly around Copenhagen.