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July 15th

Yesterday (July 15th) was another travel day by bike. this time we packed up our things from the Danhostel in Helsingor, Denmark and set our sights across the channel to Sweden. After a Sunday full of rest and sitting by the water I was fully rested and energized for this 20-mile journey to the Swedish Island of Ven.



The first leg of the trip was crossing the channel on a ferry. Not only is it awesome that there is an option of being able to transport yourself across a massive body of water along with something other than a car, they even make it super convenient. As bikers, we were the first ones on the ferry and the first ones off to the city of Helsingborg.  This continues to show the way these countries respect bikers. With treatment like this, it's hard to think of using any other mode of transportation.

Once in Helsingborg, the group was able to get a feel and walk around the city for about an hour and a half. I took the time to catch up with some family members and emails in a coffee shop. Around noon it was time to get back on the road.

The second leg of this trip was the hardest I've had so far. For the first 1/3, I stayed with the group at a relatively regular pace, but as soon as we hit the coastline Chip and I decided to pick up the pace and broke off from the rest of the group. This was fun because as someone who likes to bike fast, along with Chip who road bikes, we haven't had too many opportunities to keep a sustained fast pace so far this trip. Although the middle leg of the ride was mostly inclined, it felt good to blast through it. Certain portions of the ride were prettier than others. After the coastline, we hit wheat farms across the street from the suburbs. I found the stark contrast quit interesting.


During this ride, there was a lot less infrastructure than what we rode on in Denmark. There were a few long stretches in which we shared the road with cars going fairly fast (possibly around 35 MPH). While this wasn't necessarily comfortable, I found that the drivers respected us as bikers, much like it is in Denmark. While there were portions of the ride in which we shared with cars, a majority of it was on cycle lanes separated by some sort of median. Even along the highway. Maybe I'm just oblivious, but I feel like I don't see that often back in the states and now I've biked up the eastern coastline of Denmark and back down the western coastline of Sweden while having a definitive lane of my own to bike in most of the time. 

Going back to what we learned with Copenhagainezed, it really is about "infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure" if you put these sort of ideas into place that makes biking easy, safe, and convenient you will find more and more people doing it.... even if it's literally going from one side of the ocean to another!

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