From August 23rd to September 10th, 2024, Jerry and Odette rode a couple of loops on the tandem in Denmark and visited Copenhagen with Will.
- why Denmark
Odette and I had talked for years about a trip to Scandinavia. She’s never seen the northern lights and I’m curious about the fjords. Last winter we started thinking about another european tandem trip, maybe starting from Berlin. We thought about riding to Munich and maybe on into Italy. We thought about Austria and Poland. There is an established route from Berlin to Hamburg and a lot of options to loop back from the Baltic coast. Eventually we realized that we needed to look at what we could get from a commercial tour agency, and the on-line places were selling trips on the Baltic coast from Hamburg, but not from Berlin. If we were going to visit Denmark / Sweden it made more sense to start in Copenhagen than in Berlin. So… we agreed to arrange a two-week ride in Denmark followed by a week off the bike in Copenhagen. That would be all new territory for us and it would meet Odette’s requirements about distance and elevation during the bike portion. We ended up settling on two off-the-shelf loops from ActiveScandinvia which let us see a lot of the island of Zealand but not much of the rest of Denmark:
- boot story digression
A year before the pandemic I gave up on boot covers and gaiters and bought a pair of Louis Garneau biking boots. They had a Boa closure covered by a zippered gusset covered by a velcro flap. They were warm, they were fairly dry, and there weren’t a lot of pieces to keep track of. About three months after I bought them the Boas stopped releasing. (Later I figured out that the ratchet mechanism was fine and that I’d kinked the wire where it exited the guide-noodle.) I could only open up the boot to take it off by pulling really hard on the gusset and eventually I broke the wire. I knotted it and it worked well enough, but when the second one broke I pulled out the Boas and the wires and riveted in old fashioned boot eyelets. As lace-ups the boots worked just fine (the snowboard boot laces I used looked like they were made for them) and I got three seasons of daily winter use. This spring the zippers started to fail and the boots just felt wrong when the zippers gaped open.
I went shopping for new bike boots, looking for something without Boas. (Odette has a pair of Shimano lace-up M-5 boots that she likes, but they are six or eight years old and don’t seem to be available anymore.) I decided to get a pair of Shimano EX-900 boots with Boas because they were marketed for touring and claimed to be designed more for hiking than for biking.
They come with two Boas on each foot – kind of doubling down since I started out looking for zero Boas. They’re really light, about the same as regular bike shoes and much lighter than my climbing boots or even than my old Nashbar bike sandals. They don’t have leather, the uppers look like really short pile carpet. I liked them.
In preparation for the trip to Copenhagen Odette monitored the weather there and got increasingly anxious about rain. We both packed full rain gear and planned to take our boots, but the question remained about what other shoes to take? I decided that the boots were the only bike shoes I needed and that since I wouldn’t have brown leather low-cut bike shoes I could bring brown leather low-cut street shoes. The boots worked great for biking – we didn’t really get rained on so I didn’t test the water proof claims, but I didn’t have any complaints on the bike. They were also great for walking – I wore them in a dozen towns and for a couple of days in Copenhagen and I walked a bunch and was really happy. The first day out I wore them with a pair of below-the-ankle socks and got a hot spot on my heel but I think that would have happened with any shoes. I might not select them for really hot weather, but for touring I think that they’re a really good choice.
- tire story digression
Last year, in preparation for Portugal, we got the tandem serviced. It had Schwalbe Marathon tires on it that had seen maybe 3,000 miles and which had lots of tread left. The shop suggested new tires and I said I thought that the Schwalbes still had some life left in them. When we picked up the bike after the service, Odette, true to form, wanted new tires and I didn’t want to argue with her in front of the shop guys so I said OK. They didn’t have Schwalbe Marathons in stock so they ordered them and we made a special trip back down the Leschi to get them installed. (I made them fish the old ones out of the dumpster for me and I’m still riding them on my Fuji.)
This year the tires on the tandem also had about 3,000 miles on them, but the rear one looked “squared off” so I didn’t object when the shop suggested new tires. They installed Vittoria RideArmor which were a lot lighter than the Schwalbes but promoted as very puncture resistant so I figured we’d be okay.
On the ride to Helsingør (the first real day of the tour) we got drizzled on and in the middle of a shower we realized that we had a flat! I don’t exactly like changing tires in the rain, but I’ve done it a lot of times and it isn’t really a big deal. However, this time I was simply unable to get the bead to unseat. I guess that it was something about being tubeless ready but the tires just wouldn’t detach. I finally resorted to laying the wheel flat on the ground and standing on my toes next to the rim which broke it loose. I found a granule of glass – not a sharp shard – in the casing and a matching puncture in the tube. I replaced the tube and was pleased that it went on easier than it came off. Unfortunately the standard length valve stem was a little shorter than the depth of the rim would have indicated and it was difficult to get our frame pump to latch on securely. I got it inflated enough to ride and we made it to the hotel. The next day the rear wheel felt soft so I pumped it some more and then obsessed for the rest of the loop about low pressure and puncture resistance. I didn’t go to the trouble of swapping out the tube for one with a longer stem (under the theory that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” (I figured that I’d wait for a flat at which point I’d have to take the tire off anyway.) We got back to the hotel in Copenhagen without issue and I borrowed a floor pump and, still without switching tubes, pumped the tire all the way up. (I had a gauge that I carried with me for the whole tour but I didn’t bother to dig it out and just relied on my fingers.) There were no tire issues during the second loop, but when I got home and wanted to reassemble the bike I couldn’t get the rear tire off the rim! to install a tube with a longer stem. My toe jam technique didn’t work at home. I broke two tire levers and pinch-flatted a couple of tubes but I finally got the tire onto the rim and it now has a tube that has a longer stem. I think I’ll buy new tires before we go on any long rides. Now I need to patch a bunch of tubes…
- tour agency digression
The first indication that this was not your usual bike tour outfit was when they tried to tell us that the hotel wouldn’t store our bike cases (“liability reasons”) and insisted that we were locked in to a contract even if the case storage was a dealbreaker. Odette called the hotel directly and the problem turned out to be the agencies imagination. They didn’t do one-off routes – their only suggestion was to pick two of their standard routes and ride them sequentially. They gave us GPX files, a printed tour book and a digital tour book for the first loop. They also gave us an app with points of interest and turn-by-turn. They insisted that we couldn’t have anything but the GPX files for the second loop, but actually gave us a printed tour book as well. Most of the time they got our luggage to our hotel in the early afternoon but when we came to count on that they didn’t deliver until dinner time. In the end, it’s a case of “you get what you pay for.” We thought that the cost of the tour package (routes, hotels and luggage transfer) was reasonable in Danish Kroner – but it was actually quoted in Swedish Kroner which made it much less expensive.
I kept telling Odette that this was the consequence of dealing with a big company instead of the “sole practioner” places we used in Spain and Portugal. She is correct in pointing out that having the local rep be the person who drives around moving luggage kind of defeats that argument. She thinks that there were actually two agencies involved, one in Sweden and its’ parent in Austria. (ActiveScandanivia and Radreise, respectively.) I suspect that somebody just dropped the ball on the second loop.
- colonialism / slavery digression
So, last year in Amsterdam we noticed how preoccupied the Dutch seemed to be about slavery and the role the Netherlands played in colonialism and the slave trade. (Every museum we went into seemed to have an apology and to acknowledge that the wealth and cultural heritage on display came, in part, from human trafficking.) Then, in Portugal, it was interesting to see how the museums there put a distance between their colonialist history and the present day. (There was no denying the slave trade, but no apologies and a subtext that there was an equivalence between life under authoritarian rulers and life in a colony.) Maybe this is somehow connected with our impression that Portugal was more like third world country? Danish museums seem to pretty much skip over the issue. There apparently isn’t an automatic connection between colonialism and slavery in the Danish experience – the colony in Greenland was about resource extraction, the one in India was about trade (likely including the slave trade, but we won’t dwell on that) and the colonies in the Caribbean, those got turned over to the US. The vikings raided English and Baltic villages for slaves (thrall) and much of the Asian and Turkish treasure on display must have been a product of the slave trade. Slavery happened in Denmark as recently as in the US (up until the 1850s.) Perhaps the Dutch feel guiltier because they were more successful? There is an opportunity here for someone to write a book about blind spots. Meanwhile it’s amusing to note the little oblique references that are almost hidden away in the Museum placards.
- the flights
We flew Delta / KLM to Amsterdam and then on to Copenhagen and vice versa. We checked our luggage all the way through at the first airport. We had priority status thanks to Will. We got to the airport in Seattle quite early and spent a couple of hours in the lounge. We went through customs in Amsterdam and had plenty of time for our transfer. I started to use the fully reclining bed position but got claustrophobic and reverted to the medium recliner. I brought my wireless headphones and listened to music the whole flight. We got to the airport in Copenhagen way too early and had trouble figuring out which desk we needed to line up for. Once we got situated the process went very quickly and we had a couple of hours to kill at the gate. We both checked our backpacks in addition to our bike cases. We only had an hour and a half for the transfer in Amsterdam and we had to go through passport control but it worked. Our luggage was nearly the first on the belt in Seattle, the Customs line was short, and the Lyft ride home was uneventful. (The driver was Venezuelan and wanted to warn us about the dangers of socialism in the US.)
- the loops
We got to Copenhagen at lunchtime and put the bike together that afternoon in the hotel courtyard. There was no secure storage so I took the front wheel off and locked it and the frame to a low bike rack while also putting a U-lock through the rear triangle and rim. (It was less of a risk than it sounds since there were probably 50 rental bikes also lined up in the courtyard.) The hotel had two storage rooms that were accessible to anyone with a room key – we saw some full size bike cases in the storage and felt better about pushing the agency on that issue. We had dinner at a restaurant close to the hotel called Sanchez. The next day was a layover so we rode the first six or eight miles of our Day 1 route as an out-and-back. Central Copenhagen is busy and not a simple grid and despite the extensive bike network and GPX files we found it hard to navigate. We had some arguments about curb cuts and advance warnings, but for the most part the city riding was out of the way quickly and the more suburban riding was easy. We had lunch at a neighborhood place on our route and dinner at restaurant called Gorilla in the meatpacking district.
The first day of the tour was cloudy and moist. Odette wore rain pants. The route was flat and without too many navigational issues. We lost some time dealing with the flat tire but got to the Louisiana Modern Art Museum before lunch. This was a really good museum with an outdoor sculpture garden and a couple of temporary exhibits. We got to our hotel early in the afternoon. The GPX files took us to the ferry and the tour book expected us to use Google Maps to get to our hotel. We understood that we needed to get across the railroad tracks and found the station we were looking for, only to discover that to cross under the tracks meant going down and up a flight of stairs. It wasn’t that bad (some of the locals laughed at us) and we rode on up the hill to the hotel where we followed the signs for the bikeway. We continued up the hill and couldn’t figure out where the entrance was – we ended up cutting through an apartment parking lot because we could see the hotel building on the other side of a fence. We took a dirt path that should have led to the back side of the hotel, but there was a fence between us and it. We walked the bike a block or so on the trail before admitting that we were in the wrong place and heading back to the street, riding back down the hill, and taking the driveway next to the bikeway signs. The hotel was nice, no bike parking but we could lean it up by the front door and immobilize it with bike locks. Our room was great and the restaurant was very good.
The next day we rode to the ferry (avoiding the stairs under the railroad track) and rode a loop in Sweden. Helsingborg is a relatively big town with impressive buildings and wide streets. We started by riding up the coast to Höganäs – impressive views, sandy beaches and lots of cozy little houses. Then we cut inland for maybe five miles and rode a big road back to Helsingborg. When we got back to the Ferry terminal Odette was certain that I was heading to the wrong booth and got us into an exit lane and the attendant came out and redirected us. Odette still couldn’t believe that we needed follow the bike signs and got us into a lane behind the wrong camper and the attendant had to come out and intervene once again. The third time was the charm and we were the last vehicle onto the boat, just barely squeezing on and parking at the back of the pack. I stayed with the bike for the sailing while Odette went up to the passenger cabin. Back in Denmark we found yet another way to the hotel and were not fooled by the bikeway signs at the entrance. We ate at the hotel again and both the service and the food were as good the second night as the first. When we left the next morning we forgot a pair of water bottles advertising Bike Holland. Odette was certain she had also forgotten her underwear, but she later realized that it was all right there.
Third day we rode up the Danish coast a little past Munkerup and then cut inland to Hillerød. The ride on the coast was pretty but we encountered a bunch of construction on the road. The ride to Hillerød was mainly forest / farm land and was beautiful. It was, however, mainly unpaved and neither of us had really anticipated ten miles on gravel. The farm segments were more difficult than the forest segments. There were a lot of railroad crossings – and a couple of trains – evidently commuter rail not freight. The route eventually took us through the gardens of Frederiksborg castle which we returned to for a visit. (There were lots of paintings of guys who looked like Frank Zappa, I was more impressed by the gardens.) We had some navigational issues getting to the hotel which turned out to be a Best Western. They had us park the bike beside the main entrance. Odette was looking forward to dinner because the hotel restaurant was highly rated. In fact, it was what you’d expect at a Best Western.
Fourth day we rode to Roskilde. Much less gravel. Still pretty country with big fields of grain and leafy vegetables. On the way into town we stopped at the Viking Ship Museum for lunch and to see the boats. The tour book took us to the Cathedral but we didn’t go in. I sat with the bike while Odette tried to figure out how to get to our hotel. I noticed that the housing for the disc brake was out of the cable stop and in the process of fixing it the bike fell over and put a scrape (and another dent) in the top tube. It also stabbed my knuckle. I got the brake back in order and realized that I probably ought to think about having the bike repainted – it’s been over ten years! The hotel was a Scandia, they had covered (but not secure) parking and a decent restaurant.
On the last day of the first loop we rode back to Copenhagen. We basically rode over to the coast and then followed the water back to the city. We found sand on the trail for a ways, but the ride was mostly paved. There were some impressive underpasses and bridges by the airport but we managed the navigation in good form. We saw a lot of people in swimsuits (but not too many in the water.) The route into Copenhagen was much easier than it had been on the outbound leg. We stayed in same hotel (Absalon) and ate at the fish bar in the meatpacking district.
We had a two day lay over in Copenhagen so the next morning we rode a loop around Amager Island. Odette selected the route from the public routes on Ride With GPS because it was about 30 miles long and because it was flat. We found it to be both. It revisited the final leg of our ride the day before – which would see again on our way out of town for the second loop. It also had a generous helping of airport and related activities. However, the bottom end of the island was spectacular. We rode for several miles along a seawall that was pristine and wild (Odette thinks she saw otters.) The villages on the return segment were picturesque. We grabbed lunch at Tivoli Gardens and visited the Rosenborg Castle (more Zappa look alikes but this time with jewels.) Dinner was at a place called NR.30 which left me with absolutely no impression other than remembering that it was in a former butcher shop.
The next morning we walked all the way from our hotel to Refshaleøen, cutting through Christiania on the way. Christiania would likely be more interesting later in the day. We sat on a bench and watched floatplanes and boats and bungie jumping from a crane. We visited the Copenhagen Contemporary Art Museum where we saw an exhibit about light and color that was pretty disorienting. The guide was amused by my boots / Boas. We had lunch at the Refshaleøen food court and then walked back to the København Museum. I connected with this museum as much as with anything in the city – the exhibit about small business on Amager Island was really on point and we sat through a documentary about squatters and alternative communities that put Christiania into perspective.
We started the second loop by returning to Amager Island and the complicated underpasses and bridges from our way into town a couple of days earlier. We rode the sand along the beach again but didn’t wait for the Arken Museum to open. In Køge our hotel was outside of town, beyond the miniature city attraction. It did offer secure bike parking. The hotel restaurant wasn’t open either for lunch or for dinner. We walked to the harbor area and bought grapes and cookies in a grocery which we ate in the square. The center of town is really attractive with a lot of handsome buildings. The harbor area was where the action was, through. We ate there in the evening at a place improbably called “Bossa Nova.”
The next day we rode to Næstved, This was the day with the most climbing and the most miles of the whole trip. Just before town we saw a herd of deer, presumably on a game farm. We got to Næstved at lunch time and stowed the bike before eating at a restaurant a couple of blocks away. (The bike storage involved passing through an elevator with doors on both sides to access a garage full of spare furniture.) The town had a lot of impressive old buildings and twisty cobbled streets – we walked it twice. There were half a dozen big churches that we didn’t go into. Hotel Kirstine, where we stayed, featured a very nice modern room and a huge ancient lobby. We ate dinner there and it was excellent.
Our ninth day of riding took us from Næstved to Korsør – except that we stayed in a hotel a few miles outside of town. The hotel was weird – two parallel single-story arms stretching out from a two -story area with reception and restaurant in a mono-color beige brick. (There were at least 100 rooms in each arm so our room clear at the far end was quite a walk from the front desk.) The restaurant was not open for lunch but the front desk said we could get a burger or a salad at the bar. Unfortunately there didn’t seem to be any staff around the bar (Odette offended a woman in a business group by assuming that she worked for the hotel.) We got lunch although Odette had to compromise her vegetarian principles. We were staying in what was probably a suite – our room was incredibly small and there was a similar room off a common hallway. Further up the hallway was a living room / kitchen with glass doors out to a patio. The other rooms seemed to be full of furniture and stuff and the patio was overgrown (and littered with an abandoned bikini) so our room must have been the only active bit – it should have been a great price given the size and position. Being at the end of the arm we did have a view out to the brush and the water beyond – and we had a great vantage point to watch the lightning during the thunderstorm that evening. We parked the bike on the patio under the eves for partial protection from rain. We put shower caps over the saddles for the only time on the trip. For some reason I was nervous about the bike all night. We walked down to the beach but it was pretty rocky and there were too many people for us to stay very long. We walked a short trail to a dolmen in the woods. We ate at the restaurant which had almost nothing on the menu apart from a burger and a salad.
In the morning we rode on to Korsør and then to Sorø. We didn’t see any of the interesting part of Korsør since our route took us through the industrial district and the rain was threatening enough to limit our interest in side trips. We did make a trip out to Trelleborg to see the Viking ring fortress, a really interesting museum without a lot restoration stuff. Much of the rest of the route went through the same forest that we encountered on the ride to Hillerød. This time we took a route requiring less navigation and no railroad crossings. If Sorø had an old part or a downtown we missed it. Our hotel was very nice and had a very good restaurant but the primary attraction was the reconstruction of the thatched roof that was in progress.
The ride from Sorø to Roskilde was interesting in that we approached Roskilde from a different direction than before. There was one section of unpaved trail where we stopped to inspect another dolmen. That trail put us back on pavement at a golf course where we got held up for a few minutes by a motorcade with a very large motorcycle escort. Odette thought the GPX files took us to the hotel and seemed surprised to end up at the cathedral again. This time I waited with the bike while she went in. We eventually made our way back to the Scandia where we had stayed a week earlier. We parked under the covering again and dinner at the restaurant was about the same (they didn’t have the brown ale that seem ubiquitous in the places we ate, so they gave me red ale which they claimed was about the same.)
For our final day of riding we headed for Copenhagen, but unlike the previous ride from Roskilde we avoided the coast and headed straight for the city. The first part of the ride was bike trail next to a busy highway. Then we picked up the C99 – a bike superhighway. I was less than impressed by the C99. At best it seemed like a standard trail and at worst it was obliterated by construction. We made some wrong turns and had to backtrack but eventually found the suburbs of Copenhagen and ended up on downtown streets we knew. We parked the bike in the courtyard of the Absalom again and went around the corner to have lunch at a cafe called Apropos. Our luggage showed up and we were able to get boots and non-essential stuff into the bike cases. Will arrived late in the afternoon and we walked along the water at Peblinge So and had dinner at a neighborhood French place.
I loved the countryside and the coast. The national park / forest was not super impressive. My biggest take away was our navigation coordination which worked better than it has on most of our trips. Basically Odette had the GPX file with turn-by-turn and I had the tour book with a higher level description. (The turn by turn would have three operations ending with “left on Falligsvej” while the book would just say “go left at the church in Magley”.) The tour books fit just right into the map holder on my handlebar bag. I think we finally got the conversion into RWGPS figured out and we agreed that if the two sources disagreed the route book would prevail. . We shared what was coming next in our respective queue sheets and if we missed on one source we would usually recover on the other.
- Comwell Hotels Digression
Comwell is a chain of about sixteen hotels in Denmark and a couple in Sweden. We stayed at Comwell Borupgaard in Snekkersten the first couple of nights we were riding. It was a really nice hotel with a big modern room and a really wonderful restaurant. We noticed that we were booked in a couple of other Comwell hotels and that made us happy. The Comwell Køge Strand in Køge was different. While Borupgaard might have been a chalet in a previous life, Køge looked like it was designed to be a hotel – one story tangled arms, etc. There were construction tools piled in the hallways and the restaurant was not open. The Comwell Klarkskovgaard outside of Korsør was a step further down – interesting but impractical architecture, a room in an abandoned suite, and a barely functioning restaurant. There is probably a story, but if you didn’t know better you wouldn’t think they were part of the same chain.
- Here are the maps:
8/24 – Copenhagen test ride – Vesterbro to Skovshoved OAB. here’s the map. 16 miles
8/25 – Copenhagen day 1 – Copenhagen to Helsingør. here’s the map. 31 miles
8/26 – Copenhagen day 2 – Helsingborg – Höganäs loop (in Sweden) . here’s the map. 45 miles (approx 6 miles on the ferry)
8/27 – Copenhagen day 3 – Helsingør to Hillerød. here’s the map. 37 miles
8/28 – Copenhagen day 4 – Hillerød to Roskilde. here’s the map. 31 miles
8/29 – Copenhagen day 5 – Roskilde to Copenhagen. here’s the map. 31 miles
8/30 – Copenhagen day 6 – Amager Island loop. here’s the map. 30 miles
9/1 – Copenhagen day 7 – Copenhagen to Køge. here’s the map. 36 miles
9/2 – Copenhagen day 8 – Køge to Næstved. here’s the map. 38 miles
9/3 – Copenhagen day 9 – Næstved to Korsør. here’s the map. 38 miles
9/4 – Copenhagen day 10 – Korsør to Sorø. here’s the map. 39 miles
9/5 – Copenhagen day 11 – Sorø to Roskilde. here’s the map. 38 miles
9/6 – Copenhagen day 12 – Roskilde to Copenhagen. here’s the map. 29 miles
- Here are the tour documents:
- Copenhagen
We spent three days with Will exploring Copenhagen. It rained the last day. We visited the National Museum (a big exhibit on colonialism and not too many Zappa look alikes) and the Architecture Museum (featuring a four story slide) the Cisterns (more light and color, this time with sound) and the botanical gardens. We walked out to the Refshaleøen district again and walked through the meatpacking district a couple of times. We noted the fancy bridges and bike parking structures in various places, infrastructure that would have made Amsterdam proud. As in Amsterdam, most of the bikes on the street were not locked the way they would be in Seattle. We saw lots of cargo bikes, including a lot with the Christiania nameplate. We saw bikes with the Centurion nameplate – evidently a Danish brand and not related to my vintage Centurion. We saw several brands of rental bikes, some of which we recognized and some of which seemed Copenhagen-specific. It seemed like every hotel had rental bikes with their name on them – something we didn’t see in Amsterdam. We ate at La Bodega and at CoFoCo (both in Vesterbro, not far from our hotels) and at Alchemist.
Alchemist was maybe a little over the top. They are clear that it is not the right place for an evening of business discussions or for a first date. The experience involves 50 food “impressions”, a drink pairing (chosen from a variety of price levels) and a lavish multi-media show. It lasts four or five hours. The foods served include sheep brains and insects – mainly for the bragging rights I suspect. They have a large staff and don’t seem to be in any hurry to move diners along. Will arranged it for us and treated us to something we would never have done for ourselves. I got carried away and ordered an expensive champagne at the start, but I controlled myself the rest of the evening. Truly once in a lifetime for us – and I totally enjoyed it.
- thoughts:
- we do okay with the S&S cases as long as it is just to and from an airport
- it works well to check our backpacks on the return flight
- we need to work on lunch on the bike
- we need to venture out from the hotels for dinner
- we can probably do more than 30 miles a day
- you can’t assume that every hotel in a chain will be up to the same standard
- the biggest Parkinsons issue was having to carry a bunch of pills
- I’m more likely to get dizzy on stairs than on the bike
- the places in Copenhagen that we liked the best (Refshaleøen, and the Meat Packing district) were repurposed industrial zones
- maybe instead of repainting the tandem I’ll just get a new bike
Here are the photos
