We’ve left Denmark and already I’m feeling a little bit at a loss. Denmark was becoming so familiar. I even had hopes that I may one day speak the language. We are not even 10 km over the Danish-German border and some differences between the two countries are already apparent. German and less english. We’ve taken english-speaking Danes for granted. My German is non-existent except for the overlapping words with english and “good-bye”, “hello”, “thank you”. We’ll see how a visit to the supermarket goes – I’ll be relying on the the visual cues.

Another difference is the cycle paths. Denmark’s are so well-posted that I was always surprised should we make a mis-turn. We hit the German border and we were not even sure which side of the road we were suppose to be on and constantly had to keep alert to where the bike lanes were (ie. against traffic, with traffic, on the sidewalk, etc). We’ll see if this becomes less confusing as we move on. Throughout Denmark we have been using cycling maps with a 1:100,000 scale. Our German map at this point is a 1:150,000 scale and I can definitely tell the difference in the lack of detail. I am sure I’ll adjust.

The weather has been somewhat unpredictible. It has rained every day for almost two weeks but sometimes the morning showers clear and sometimes they don’t. Today they didn’t. It was a gray, gloomy day. Maybe that’s why we decided to book the cruise on a bright orange ship with matching statesrooms (or cubbies). It will be nice to have a bed for a week which we don’t have to blow up and collapse on a daily basis. The cycling has been fun but the tearing down camp has not been. Making camp is better. It takes less time and we are eager to get inside. Cycling has been great but with weather like today’s it is really hard to get motivated to get going.

The one unfortunate thing about the cruise is that we will not be able to take our bikes on board due to space restrictions. This means that we will have to return to Amsterdam