travel

Arrival in Odense

The usual night’s sleep and semi-sleep, waking at night with every movement of the ship magnified by the dark, my horizontal position and dreaminess, my heart in my mouth with every pitch and roll until I finally roll back to sleep. After a buffet breakfast for £12 there is only two hours till we dock. Out on the sundeck again I watch the back of the ship, the ramp we drove in on, now vertical, rise and fall against the sealine. The sky is patchy blue, auguring well for good weather for the journey to Odense.
There is not much to say about the passportless disembarkation and the ride on the boring E20 to get to Odense, other than that the hospital complex where I am staying is close to the exit of the motorway, my GPS led me to park exactly outside the door to this former old people’s home (according to Niels) where my room is up in the third floor attic.

Where I am staying in the attic


My motorcycling fantasy has come true in that I was able to ride straight into a building through wide opening doors, the large lockable brick bike shed where I can leave Bertha

Bertha making friends with the Danish bicycles

Pretty accurate location

My trip to Denmark and Sweden starts: September 2012

Day 1: 8th September 2012

Another trip, something to be looked forward to and prepared for, though this time a mixture of work – 5 weeks at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense – and 5 nights in Sweden camping plus whatever short travels I can fit in, later in the year than I would usually chose to travel with a tent. So with so much stuff- camping gear and proper clothes, laptop and text books – the bike is really loaded down with a mountain of stuff but not that difficult to get used to in the end.

This is some of it.. note the toasty Rab sleeping bag
Getting ready to leave

Stopping at the first set of traffic lights is the most wobbly part. The journey through three counties to Harwich is as enjoyable as ever, a nice route through beautiful villages, and blessed with warm sunshine right into the evening as the boat sails off. There are only about 6 bikes on this crossing, a couple of beautiful red Ducati Multistrada among them, one with expensive panniers held together with silver gaffer tape after its owner lost the key and had to break them open, a Ninja owner who told me he watched on CCTV footage his bike blowing over in the wind in his work carpark and suffering hundreds of pounds of damage. Riding on to the boat up the ramps is always fun but strapping the bikes down seems hit and miss. Some crews really help others not at all, no advice today so it’s a struggle to get their old straps to work and we are there on the car deck long after the motorists have gone.

Harwich to Esbjerg ferry

The cabin is the same as usual and always my irrational fear that suddenly someone else will burst in and I find out I will have to share it.

Nice helmet


Sunset over containers

Up on the sundeck as we pull out of Harwich slowly at first then gather speed and the boat lists as we turn to the south coming out of the estuary and then east again as the boat points out to sea. With theses changes of direction car alarms sound below, despite the many requests to turn them off. There are only a couple of dozen people here on the deck. There’s an end of season feel. But the sky is beautiful as we look toward the sun as we leave the Suffolk coast behind. I realise I’ve been looking at the sea for 45 minutes. It takes these trips just to get into a slightly different kind of space.

Leaving Harwich

I think this is my seventh motorcycle trip. I feel a bit bemused about that. I was the one with reassuring information in the queue of bikers earlier. Since I started all this, I have a bigger bike, innumerable gadgets and lots more grey hair.

Look, that’s me

New Book from Ted Simon

I’ve been reading Ted’s second (I think) book Riding Home (sometimes I think its called Riding High oddly). I see he’s got a new book coming out, Rolling Through the Iles, about a journey he’s taken in Britain, ‘back down the old routes that led to Jupiter’s Travels’ says the front cover. Hmm, nothing like milking that first book.

Sharing routes from Garmin Zumo and Basecamp

Basecamp is the Mac sort of version of Mapsource. If you are both clever and lucky you can design routes on the Mac and export them to the Garmin and retrace them. Its easy to import routes into Basecamp from the GPS. But what about sharing them on a blog or something similar in a more intelligent way than just taking a screenshot and posting the picture? This is useful but not quite it: http://rolfje.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/how-to-share-garmin-routes-with-your-friends/
Then there’s Garmin Connect but that doesn’t seem quite right.
What about this from Motowhere. Its a route I’ve placed there a while back and it should show up here:


What about satellite images?


Here’s an import from another motorcycle route sharing website Open Road Journey. It seems a bit more developed than MotoWhere, where the ‘forums’ are moribund and just full of spam. ORJ appears to have real articles on it:


Finally, there’s Everytrail of course.It seems more sophisticated when tacking GPX files from the Garmin.
the ‘back’ way to Ipswich and a route around Cambridge at EveryTrail
EveryTrail – Find trail maps for California and beyond

13th May the last day and coming home

13th May This is the last full day of riding. Last evening a red bearded young man arrived on a bicycle, pulling a trailer with an Ortieb bag. He set up near me and we talked.
German cyclist
He is from a German town near the Czech border and is riding to Iceland and around Norway, riding till September I think he said. We were both traveling down to Kristiansand that day – its about 60k but his work was cut out to cycle there, for me it meant going an extremely roundabout route. At the end of the day I had ridden 150miles. I wont detail the routes I took but I don’t think there is a boring road in Norway, apart from when I found myself on the main roads by the coast. A downpour had me retreating into a conveniently placed shopping centre for hot chocolate and a chicken roll. Afterwards my GPS wanted to take me straight into Kristiansand and given that I was soggy I was tempted to call an end to my travels and head straight for the campsite ‘near’ or so I thought to the ferry terminal for tomorrow’s early boat. As it happened I persisted in searching for one final enjoyable route. I have to conclude that Norway is an ideal country for a motorcycling trip. Finding the campsite took ages and the GPS (more about that later) sent me in mad directions, but by 3.30 I pulled into a swanky site in mid refurbishment into something of stellar quality.
Kristiansand campsite
Some of t was already done. Everything is going to work by a card which happy campers charge up and swipe to use the stove or the shower but not thankfully to flush the toilet. The toilet and shower block was astonishing with slate floors and beautiful sinks though they are far too small and the incredible number of spotlights seem to stay on permanently (how easy it might have been to install movement sensors. I set my alarm for 5.45 but in the event I was awake before then – it got light long before – and set up packing up my damp tent and other belongings. I rolled out by 6.15, passed around the barrier and, not getting lost this time, was checked in at the Colorline terminal by 20 to 7. Having learnt from the last trip up to Norway I found myself a comfortable seat, with my book (The Devils) and a supply of food which you have to hide from the food and drink police who are employed to tell people off if they are eating their own food on board or have taken drinks onto the deck. Sitting next to me were 12 or so highly international students, from a Bible college it turns out in Norway, who had a free trip on the ferry. I talked at length to James from Zambia about this and that. He was very earnest. Its easy to imagine him as a Christian. They seemed a nice bunch but without irony.
Once off the boat I headed down the E25 and the four hours or so to Esbjerg to catch my 8th ferry of this trip, the final one and the longest back to Harwich, arriving Sunday. On route in poured and I pulled off to a deserted picnic area and struggled into my waterproof suit as I was getting wet and cold. It took about 10 minutes to get into and by that time the weather was already improving. However, the screen on my GPS which I had damaged last year by dropping it let in water between its two skins. It has guided me back to Esbjerg but despite trying to dry it out with the hair dyryer in my cabin (how nice it is to have a bed and a shower and somewhere to sit) the screen seems to have had it and I cant get today’s stats from it.

Waiting for the ferry were a bunch of people with bikes, a couple riding a Honda Gold Wing and two men from Denmark on their way to Scotland, one on a lovely bright yellow Laverda which he maintains getting scarce parts from a specialist dealer in Koln and the other on a vintage v twin Honda. One of them riding a 1994 BMW k1100, the others told me was a man ‘with no hobbies’ so when he was 60 learnt to ride, now he’s 62, and rather large, a friendly slightly bumbling giant wearing a high vis vest stretched extremely tightly over his jacket. Another man, a Brit who runs a bike courier company in London rode a 1200gs which he has had a few surprising and expensive problems with. The more I talk to bikers the more I see that they get into scrapes with their bikes i.e. being stuck half way up a curb on a street in London and having to wait for a passer by to help them move, or having to be careful about wear to park because they know they can’t move the bike backwards or up an incline. So its not just me. There were also two (separate) eccentric cyclists, one from Denmark with a bg mustache completely coving his mouth, a battered Tasmanian hat, smoking a pipe which he repeatedly appeared to put,, still lit into his trouser pocket. He plans visiting Oxford and Cambridge (pubs he says – and Oxford because he is a fan of inspector Morse) and another man who is originally from New Zealand but has been working in Denmark for many years. He said he was in his sixties and he appeared to be wearing make up. How different this bunch of enthusiasts and eccentrics is to the other – or some of the other – travelers. On the stairwell I just overheard a bunch of retired Brits comparing notes about exotic places in the world they have been to, ‘Fiji, been there done that’ one of them said, describing how they stayed on a gated compound. These ferries seem to wage war on passengers bringing their own food and drink (which is the obvious thing to do as prices are hugely inflated). On this ship there are signs everywhere and on ColorLine they have their own security people who go round telling people off. There seems a trend in accommodation nowadays to once you’ve got people in, and they have already paid for entry, then milk them for as many extras that you might consider should come as part as what you’ve paid for. So these ships seem designed so that every public space is a restaurant or bar and in posh campsites every facility, including wifi sometimes, seems to require an extra charge. It seems the cheaper campsites often just don’t bother with the extra trouble of setting up systems for paying – so wifi was nearly always free for example.

I am on deck 6, level with the cars and in fact only 15 feet away from poor Bertha. The captain has come on and told us we are in for a rough night -which is unusual. This time tomorrow I will be plunged in to going through the backlog of work emails and preparing for another conference.

We’re on the home stretch now on this Sunday morning, with the coast of Suffolk (I’m sure that is the white dome of some power station) in sight as we sail slowly down it. Its a bright day though there are clouds in the sky. It was a quite rough night as the captain warned us and again I could not sleep much. With every lurch my heart was in my mouth. First I thought we might capsize, then when we failed to do that, I worried about Bertha and whether I had secured her properly. This is something some of the others have said they worry about.

Reflections:
What worked well: having some dehydrated food so that I didn’t have to find a shop if I turned up at a remote campsite; when I did buy meat or fish locally to cook it was delicious; having a really toasty sleeping bag helped me get a good night’s sleep in quite chilly climates; generally all the camping equipment worked well; the overall route and timescale was just right; nearly all roads in Norway are stunningly beautiful; taking a waterproof suit was a great idea; fitting extra lights paid dividends for the long dark tunnels; the BMW bike gear was good – not too hot and reasonably waterproof even without the liners; I had two really good books.
What didn’t work so well: some campsites in Norway were set in surprisingly ugly settings, i.e. next to big petrol stations and there was no one there to welcome you – or sell you shower tokens; learning that the bits of old rope hanging around on Norwegian ferries are to tether your motorcycle; I was optimistic in how far north I would get – I only needed one of the three maps I took; I never used the wire mesh Pack Safe nor the water carrier nor the Ortlieb folding bowl.