Später und später
The night train ride was smooth and undisturbed, save for the border control who didn’t ask for Szoki’s passport after I answered in accent-free German, and a guy who thought one of us was in his cabin, but it turned out he was in the wrong carriage. Breakfast was served and eaten in bed, and I experimented afterwards with yoga stretches as far as the tight space enabled.
The travel office in Vienna was right: we arrived about an hour late in Hamburg, and for everyone else, this seemed completely normal. Even so, our train to Copenhagen wasn’t due until another hour later, so we had some time to kill.
I have found memories of Hamburg station from the time when I worked partly in Denmark six years ago – seems I was so much younger then! We flicked the Birdy bike open, loaded the bags and walked off to the main square along the pedestrian street. Well, in Hamburg, it looks like everything is full of cargo bikes. The first one, a full-suspension dual-battery wonder of engineering passed us right as we left the station, and we saw tricycle child carriers (“pedal prams”), folding-box mini cargos, an apparently home-built e-recumbent trike, a four-wheeler closed-cabin monster of a cargo
bike driven by the UPS courier, and every food stall seemed to have a cargo bike next to it. There was even a slowly rusting cargo bike chained up and left to die in front of a sushi bar. Normal bikes were absolutely everywhere, it was the monday morning rush hour. Oh yes, we also saw quite a few folding bikes, swarming in and out of the station like little fish.
The train to Copenhagen arrived late, there was already a crowd on the platform, we hurried to find the right carriage and I nearly loaded half of our gear into the wrong one, but after everything was hastily secured in the luggage racks, the intercom announced that the train will start half an hour late. Well, this means we will reach Copenhagen around sunset, and the seven-hour ride to Gedser will drag late into the night, but at least we will arrive safely in time to pick up the cargo bike before the shop closes. We will have to accept the uncertainty for now and just hope to make good progress.
On our way, we set up the connection between the cameras, the phones and the online album, had a light lunch, and gave our phones and bike lights one last charge. The rain shifted from a drizzle to a downpour and back again, and many of the fields and forest patches outside were flooded – mildly concerning for camping wild.
We passed through the beautiful historic Rendsburg railway bridge, and thought we saw another, very similar bridge in the distance. It turns out the tracks run a full circle to connect the high embankment with the city station which is at sea level. We just passed Padborg and are finally in my beloved Denmark, anxiously watching the weather, speculating about our average speed and the available ferries, and generally aching to finally get on our wheels. I guess we will soon be aching in another way.
