Skip to main content

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!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

July 29th

On our final day together as a group, we had rented out a private room in a restaurant to give presentations on our final project and share a final dinner together. Although the presentations only lasted three minutes per student, by the end of them all it was evident we had all learned a lot, so much that literally none of our final projects were on the same topics. It was really cool to see what everyone pulled from this trip with their different perspectives. As a person whos studying landscape architecture I focused on rethinking the street as a public space rather than just pavement for transportation and how the location infrastructure is in can encourage or discourage bicycle use. So many people had ideas that weren't completely centered around planning... even the planners. But, all of our ideas were still based around the idea of using the bicycle as the main form of transportation. As this is, unfortunately, my last blog post about my study abroad experience I thought i...
Post a Comment
Read more

July 18th

After a fun night of celebrating our professor Marc's 50th birthday in Malmö, it was time to get the show back on the road and head to the Netherlands. We left our hotel at 5:45 AM in order to catch a 6:30 AM train from Malmö back to Copenhagen. This ride only took 35 mins to go across and under the channel between Sweden and Denmark. I had never crossed a channel on a train before so it was quite fun to experience. Once we got to Copenhagen and went through airport security we had a little over an hour to burn until our flight to Amsterdam was boarding. Some of the group had rougher mornings than others... The flight to Amsterdam was fast, in fact, they even shaved 20 mins off of the original wait time. Once we got our luggage we hurried to the train station of the massive transportation hub that is the Amsterdam Airport and caught the first train to Utrecht. This train ride only took 45 mins to go 22 miles. I found it very comfortable as well. Once we got to our hostel I...
Post a Comment
Read more

July 28th

Today we didn't have anything planned but a canal boat trip at 4:00. Prior to the canal ride, I decided to chill and work on my blog... nothing special. The canal ride was nothing less than special. It gave us a chance to just relax, take the city in, and enjoy each other's company. And that we did. We filled the boat with drinks and food... maybe a little too much wine, and set off. During the ride, I realized how special not only the experience of this whole trip was but how special the group itself was. I want to give a special shoutout to everyone that was part of the group if it wasn't for everyone's openness and eagerness to become friends with each other I don't think this program would have been so great. Very early on I felt comfortable with everyone on the trip and this allowed me to open up more and be open to new experiences and learning opportunities. I honestly think if our group didn't gel like this we wouldn't have learned so much, because ...
Post a Comment
Read more