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The Least Fixed Point Motorcycle Club conquer Scandinavia, part 1

Day One

After last minute flurrying to tidy and pack, I packed up my bonnie Bonneville and went to meet TonyG at his in Mile End. The ride to Harwich was uneventful, and we arrived a full hour before check-in. With motorbikes we were loaded first, though by the time we'd improvised stabilisation schemes with ratchets and straps and chocks, all the car drivers had parked up and were harassing the dour bartender.

The sailing was fairly smooth, so in the end it wasn't concern for our bikes that kept us awake. It was the comedic duo of deranged walruses sharing the four berth cabin with us. Even the most outrageous impression of a whale dying from tuberculosis would not be a patch on one man's snoring; each intake of breath was a unique landscape of sound. In comparison, the other man was pedestrian, but made it up in doggedness. The earplugs saw action before we'd even started touring.

We arrived in Esbjerg around noon, on the deck gawping at the huge windfarms. After the almost invisible customs and border control we hopped straight on the E20 East. Sometime in the afternoon we stopped in Odense for lunch, giving TonyG a chance to see just how garbled Danish sounds to a Swedish speaker, and the girl in the bakery the inverse experience.

There is a two-part bridge joining Funen with Zealand; we slowed a bit and kept in the right-most lane to enjoy the crossings, along with some of the other traffic. After the bridge to Zealand there was another section of motorway all the way to Copenhagen, but we exited early and went to Køge on the Eastern coast. A couple of tins of Tuborg and some camp-stove-cooked goulash rounded off the day.

Usually, when camping the sun is one's alarm. Waking just after 5am the only reasonable reaction is to declare a sleep in, and so it happened that we left Køge a little late and covered not so much ground.

We did manage to cross over into Sweden though, skirting around Copenhagen and taking the long long bridge to Malmö (Øresundsbron). The road outside of Malmö had substantial roadworks and wasn't much fun, so we stopped after a few miles in historic Lund to fuel up and get some currency ('historic', we decided, due to the pretty but horrible to ride on paved streets). Since it was early evening by then we settled on camping at Ringjöstrand near Hörby.

Despite waking very early and resisting the urge to sleep the morning out, we dallied with pastries and doughnuts and Ringjöstrand ate our dust late morning. From Hörby we continued following the E22 until it met the Southeast coast at Kristianstad, then kept near the sea through Karlskrona and ice lollies at the world's most soulless mini-golf (called "Adventure Golf", despite the clear influence of graph paper and high school physics exams rather than, say, Indiana Jones). Eventually we fetched up at Kalmar, a port town with very pretty buildings and lots of greenery.

London attacked by tourists

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