July 26, 2022
Day 1: Fredericia to just outside Aalborg
(Mostly by train)
When Dea’s father and her brother decided to have a big joint birthday celebration at the end of July in the family holiday house in Northern Denmark, a location on the shore of a fjord very far from any train stations, it seemed like the only way guests would be arriving would be by car. But then Dea and I realized that this would be a great opportunity for us to have a trial run of travelling with Kevin. Other commitments meant that we wouldn’t be able to cycle the whole way there, but we realized we could take a train to the big northern city of Aalborg and then cycle the 70 kilometres to the summer house, enjoy the party, then return home in much the same way. We’d get a few days of practice at cycling and camping with Kevin, and I wouldn’t have to get in any cars.
And today was the day that we set out on this trial run, departing our community at 10 am after quite a bit of time spent gathering items, fixing up bikes, packing, and so on. It had been a while since we’ve bike toured, two years since we got home from going around the world, so there had been a bit of work to do. We still had the same bikes, patched up by my fair hands with an array of new parts, but we’d splurged on new panniers. I’d gone for red Ortliebs, Dea for some lovely yellow Thule panniers that by 9:30 am on the day of departure she’d already grown annoyed with due to them not having adjustable straps. It did seem to be quite the design flaw, but they were very bright. If nothing else, at least we looked the part.
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We’d decided to alternate who towed Kevin, with the other one carrying more gear, and Dea rode with him today. It was only four kilometres to the station, on a route I ride a few times a week to work, but it felt great to be on loaded bikes with our baby in tow. “What do we do now, should we play the Spotting Things Game?” I asked.
But there was no time for that, we were soon at the station, where we had to get two bikes and a push chair (bike trailers are technically not allowed on trains in Denmark, so we had to replace the connecting arm with a little wheel to convert it into a push chair) up an elevator and onto a very packed train. We had pre-booked space for our many items, so it was just a case of me asking people to move seats as I barged on with the first fully loaded bike. “Don’t move there though, we’ve also got those seats booked for our trail- I mean push chair.” Anyway somehow we got everything on before the train rolled out of the station. Kevin, by the way, had been asleep the whole time.
He did wake up before long though and sat with us for the rest of the journey. Dea and I feel incredibly fortunate to have such a remarkably good baby that he didn’t complain once during the three hours it took us to get to Aalborg. He just looked out the window and around at other passengers, smiled at people, looked like he was having the time of his life. A born traveler, I would say.
We arrived in Aalborg at 13:40 and once everything was on the platform I tried to fix Dea’s new kickstand that had inexplicably broken on the train, without success.
We then repeated our trick of converting our push chair into a bike trailer and got everything down an elevator and up out into a park to the west of the station. There was a lot of wind and a little light drizzle in the air, but nothing that was going to stop this grand adventure. I went to cycle off but was almost immediately brought to a halt by Dea shouting “stop, my gears won’t shift.” This must surely be a record - three pedal strokes into our tour and Dea was suffering her second mechanical. I’m sure she must be very proud of the work I did fixing her bike up for the trip.
The problem was old cable/housing and it wasn’t something either of us wanted to fix with Kevin falling asleep in the trailer. It could still shift well enough for her to cycle, so cycle we did, following some bike paths for a few kilometers through Aalborg until we reached a supermarket to get supplies. Kevin was awake again by now so we laid him out on some grass while we ate some snacks. It wasn’t very long before we’d attracted the attention of a dreadlocked man on a bicycle who came over to ask about our trip, reminding me of how being out on touring bikes could break down barriers and create openings for meeting people you don’t normally get. “I follow a couple of touring cyclists on YouTube,” he said. “They cycled for 10 years then had a baby. They thought they would stop but they just got a trailer and kept cycling another five years. The kid is five now, always lived on the bike.”
After the supermarket we cycled on some more paths through the rest of Aalborg then headed in a western direction out of town on a path beside a road directly into the face of a massive headwind. “Can I cycle right behind you?” Dea asked, and I felt like Wout Van Aert towing Jonas Vinegaard up the Pyrenees as we headed up a steep climb into the gale.
It was an almighty battle to get up the long straight climb, that brought to mind climbs we had done in windy conditions some 4000 metres up in the Andes. It really was very tough work, until after several kilometres we reached something that looked a bit like a summit and I checked an app on my phone to see how much altitude we’d gained. “Oh, we only went up 19 metres.”
But we were almost at our goal, a backyard where we had prearranged to sleep through the Danish hospitality website brug min baghave (literally, use my backyard). I think it’s mostly for people like us that need a place to camp for the night, although I guess if you should like to use a Danish backyard for something else you could always ask. We just wanted somewhere to sleep though, and the owners of this particular backyard said we could stay even though they weren’t home. Their teenage son showed us around instead, and it was an interesting backyard too, with geese, chickens, turtles and rabbits. Luckily they were all in cages. Not luckily for the animals maybe, but luckily for our chances of getting some sleep.
We put up the tent and it was really fun to be doing it, this thing we’d done together so many times all over the world, with our baby on the ground watching on. He still looked like he was having the time of his life, which, given his age he may very well have been.
I then spent more hours than I care to think about cooking food on our little camping stove, first for Kevin (mashed courgettes, it was a big hit) and then pasta and vegetables for us, before we gave Kevin a wash and put him to bed. I then fixed the problems with Dea’s bike and got into my sleeping bag and wrote this blog post, which has taken bloody ages by the way.
It has been a great day, and best of all is that Kevin really just seems to have loved every minute of it. I, on the other hand, am pretty exhausted. It’s definitely hard work looking after a baby and cycle touring at the same time, and we haven’t even got through a night in the tent yet, but the first long day of adventuring together is finally at an end.
We cycled 16 kilometres.
Today's ride: 16 km (10 miles)
Total: 16 km (10 miles)
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