October 11, 2022
Home to Fredericia
We enjoyed a nice evening with our host Gunnar after he came home and showed us into his lovely old house. It was on a steep pedestrian street close to the harbour filled with characteristic old homes, and there was a great view over Flensburg from his window, which we enjoyed in the morning:
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We had time for breakfast and then cycled back through Flensburg to the train station, in much better weather than the evening before. We arrived on the platform with 45 minutes to spare. The train was already waiting, and we were pleased that it was a DSB train, a Danish train, a familiar train to take us home, but the doors were locked as they were cleaning the carraiges. So we sat and waited as the time passed and the platform got busier. There was another cyclist too, and even though we had reservations for our bikes and our pushchair/trailer, it would have been nice if we could have got on before the crowds arrived.
Then a very officious train conductor stepped off the train. She went over to the other cyclist first, was clearly laying down the law to her, as well as the other waiting passengers, then she came our way. She was a well-built woman, not someone to be messed with. She spoke German, asking if we had tickets for all of our many things and then explaining to us very sternly how things were going to work on her train. Luckily, Dea can understand German, and she translated for me once the woman had left. "She said we have to take all of the bags off the bikes. We will get on before the other passengers and we have to put our bikes where she tells us and all the bags up above the seats." We had to laugh. We had made it all of the way across Germany jumping on trains at the last minute with the bags on the bikes, never having a problem with anyone, not even having our tickets checked, and now here we were getting on our Danish train home and encountering at last a very stereotypically German train official.
Well we did what she wanted anyway. Dea went on with Kevin, which meant I had to unhook eight panniers plus backpacks from the two bikes and then try and get it all on the train with a crowded platform of impatient people watching and waiting to board themselves. In fact they were so keen to get on the train that several people offered to help me, and I had to carry very little myself in the end. The officious woman then made us put the bikes in a very specific way, and made us sit in seats that were not the ones reserved for us, and yet she then explained that it was because it would be nicer for us to sit with all our things together, and we realised that she was alright really.
The train departed and we soon crossed over the border into Denmark. Outside of the window we could see the road where we had crossed the other way a couple of months earlier. It felt like so much longer ago. How great it had felt to be leaving Denmark for a while, and how great it also felt to be returning now.
The train headed north through the flat countryside of southern Jutland and before too long it was pulling in at Fredericia station. Luckily the train terminated here, as it took forever to get the bikes and all the bags off the train separately. Funnily enough, all those people who had been so keen to help when they were wanting to get on the train, were nowhere to be seen now!
We got everything off the train eventually and reassembled it all for the final four kilometre ride back to our community. It was a nice day as we cycled along on very familiar bike paths, past the harbour and up the hill towards our home. Autumn was in full swing up here in Denmark, and there was time for one more round of 'catch the leaf' as our journey neared its end.
Of course no one had told Kevin that we were only cycling four kilometres home (or rather, we had, but he didn't understand) and he nodded off in his trailer as he had become so wonderfully accustomed to. He tended to wake up when we stopped cycling and we didn't want him to wake up too early for he needed to take at least a 20 minute nap, so when we reached the turn off for our community we just cycled straight past it. Now we were heading west, retracing the route we had cycled out of here two months earlier. "Shall we do it, shall we cycle back to Belgium again?!" I joked. "I like to cycle things twice!"
It was a precious idea. This trip had been so good, so special, it would have been the best thing in the world to live it all over again. But that wasn't really an option, unfortunately. We had a different life now, a life that we were all excited about going back to. Before long we turned our bikes around, and rode the final few metres of the trip back to our community, back to our home.
We went into our little house again, and I set Kevin down on his back in his play area. Before we started cycling, we used to put him on his back in his play area and he would lie there and look up, maybe paw at his purple elephant a little bit, and we could get on with something else as he just lay there. This time, two seconds later and:
The game had changed, I realised, as I looked around at our not-prepared-to-house-a-toddler home and began to see all of the work I had ahead of me getting the place very rapidly baby-proofed. Kevin had changed so much over the trip. Hopefully all of the things he had done, seen and experienced had helped him in his development. Of course he won't remember his first ever bicycle tour, but I am quite sure he enjoyed it a lot and that he got a lot out of it. Dea and I certainly had. The time travelling together as a family on our bicycles had been truly special, really amazing. It would be no exaggeration to call this cycle trip life-changing, not least because we felt like we had left home with a baby, and come back with a boy.
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1 year ago
Today's ride: 6 km (4 miles)
Total: 1,277 km (793 miles)
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