Today, you will not believe it, I had an early start around 10:30. Yesterday’s arrival wasn’t late, so I had time to prepare things in the evening. Also, this heartless, industrialised camping facility I stayed at, required a check out before 12:00.

Since I visited Göteborg already, I just passed through and didn’t see much beside the harbour area. My last bike trip in Sweden, from Stockholm to Göteborg via Falun, ended with the ferry back to Germany shown at the photo. It would have been an early exit strategy for this journey in case something critical on my bike or body would have failed.

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After yesterday’s torturous ride, today went surprisingly well. I found a saddle position that was acceptable, and my legs were well rested.

The night and morning were rainy, so I slept long to the wonderful sound of raindrops hitting the tent. I got up around 11:00 and had, you’re guessing right, a late start. Again.

However, I am starting to develop a routine:
– breakfast,
– morning shower,
– packing up,
– grocery shopping (for lunch, road snacks, dinner and next day’s breakfast),
– riding until the evening,
– looking up the next camp site on the route and driving there,
– put up the camp,
– evening shower,
– dinner,
– laundry,
– online activities (GPS upload, blog writing, looking stuff up), and
– sleeping.

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It’s getting colder. At the beginning of this night, temperatures were around 13 degree Celsius. That was the first night in which I closed my sleeping bag. During riding, I put on a wind vest, even though it’s above 20 degree Celsius, it feels colder.

The day started with bike maintenance.  I looked at yesterday’s fail in daylight.

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Total distance: 150.8 km

I Internet-diagnosed my deaf fingers as Guyon’s tunnel syndrome, a common issue for bike riders. After checking out of the hotel, I put out the tool bag and raised the handlebar to take some weight from my hands. The new position allows me to completely take off pressure from the region where the ulnar nerve passes through the palm of the hand. I also took some Ibuprofen over the day as an anti-inflammatory measure. That’s what it must be like as a professional bike athlete, shaving legs, popping pills, and colourful tape holding together the overused body parts.

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No stage today, so there’s no GPS track.

Regeneration and seeing Copenhagen were the only items on today’s agenda.

I half walked half biked through the city, saw a lot and ate a lot. Scattered across the harbour areas, there was a festival called “Kulturhavn”, which I visited in the evening.

Here’s a picture of the town hall.

Copenhagen is definitely worth a holiday on its own.

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What a day, 182.9 km at 21.5 km/h, two GPS tracks because there was a ferry again.

Since yesterday was very short, and tomorrow will be Copenhagen day, i.e. recreation, I decided to try hard to get there by today. Otherwise I would either loose one day by splitting this stage into two short ones, or at least half a day of Copenhagen if I would have put up camp some km outside town first and then move to another site for the second night in Copenhagen.

I hit the road at 11:30, not really an early start, but better than the last days. While I was thinking about the smoke on the horizon, I realised that I didn’t read any news for nearly a week. Maybe that was Copenhagen burning down. One more reason to hurry.

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[Something went wrong with this post. I uploaded it yesterday and it just went empty. Maybe a synchronisation bug between the WordPress app and servers. No revisions to roll back on the server. So I had to rewrite it.]

Note: Strava included the fairy segment as a straight line, since it does not support tracks with gaps.

Garmin data:
Distance: 65 km
Average velocity: 19.2 km/h
Average pulse: 118 bpm

Tent walls are thin, too thin. I fell asleep to a snoring neighbour, and woke up to a multi-directional zipper concert that should be considered as a demo for cinema surround-sound systems. My alarm was set to 09:40. I gave up earlier.

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Today was much less exhausting than yesterday. Temperatures around 28 degree Celsius and a light breeze provided good riding conditions. For comparison, yesterday I measured an average speed of 18.4 km/h at an average pulse of 148. Today, I achieved 18.9 km/h at 128 heart beats per minute. Also no signs of dehydration (liquid intake ~7.5 litres).

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Dear diary, today I realised that this might become a more challenging and exhausting endeavour than I might have thought.

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So far so good. This stage started late, at 17:28, because I finished some last minute tasks for work and had trouble installing offline maps on my phone. So only 70.4 km today. But since I didn’t do any bike riding for at least 4 weeks, to give my knee a rest, it probably was a good thing to start short.

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