Where are Ron and Ellen?
Summer 2002
Munich, Germany, to Fåborg, Denmark
We left the US on 30 May, arriving in Munich at 7:30 in the morning on 31 May. Our friend Uta was there to meet us at the airport, bless her, and took us and our luggage home to her lovely flat before going on to work. We spent the day unpacking our bikes and putting them together, and reorganizing our stuff so that we could leave in Munich Ellen's conference materials and clothes and Ron's resupply and extra bike parts he needed for travel in the Ukraine after Ellen returned home. We met Uta in downtown Munich for dinner and a concert. Early in the evening the next day, Saturday 1 June, we and our bikes took the overnight train from Munich to Padborg, Denmark, almost due north of Munich and just a couple of km over the Danish/German border.
We arrived in Padborg at 6:30 a.m, strapped our packs on the back of our bikes, and set off on national bike route 8 towards Sønderborg. The route was beautiful, through a wooded nature preserve and rolling farmland, and for much of the way, along the coastline. We'd forgotten that (at least in Germany and Denmark) all stores are closed on Sundays, so we were starving before we detoured into the town of Broager in the early afternoon. There we finally found an ATM to get some Danish krone (Denmark is an EU member but voted against using the Euro), and, equally important, an open bakery where we could buy bread and cheese and pastries for a very late lunch, and refill our water bottles. We'd been thankful for the two slices of pizza saved from our dinner the night before, which had kept us going to this point!
We rolled into Sønderborg in the late afternoon and discovered to our surprise that there are two hostels in the area, and we had inadvertantly made our reservation in the one 7 km east of the center of town rather than the one in the center. Our biking the following day was around Sønderborg (after a trip to the grocery store), then south and east on the Kegnaes penninsula. We ate our picnic lunch on the edge of a big bay, where we watched a para-sailor gliding back and forth.
On Tuesday morning we left Sønderborg, still following bike route 8, rode to Fynshav (on the southeast coast of Jutland), took the ferry from there to Bojden (on the west coast of Fyn), and continued on to the lovely old harbor town of Fåborg. This time there was only one hostel, in a very old building, right in the center of town. On one of our biking days out of Fåborg we explored the nearby islands of Lyø and Avernakø, using the ferry to go between the islands and to and from Fåborg. On the other day we biked north, into much hillier country.
While in Fåborg we visited the public library and tried to send a report from their Internet computer (containing much of the above information) to our travel distribution list, but the message simply wouldn't go. So we settled for a brief message to our daughter telling her we were alive and well, but that a travel report would have to wait for another, more cooperative connection. Despite the Internet problem, it was a gorgeous new library, well stocked with books, magazines, CDs, videos, books on tape, local history materials, and with a large children's area. There seemed to be lots of staff and also lots of patrons. We were in several other public libraries as we traveled through Denmark, and all were as big, as beautiful, as well stocked, and as well staffed as this one. We were impressed!
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Last updated: 20 July 2002