Best Biking on the Planet

Copenhagen, Denmark -- Rest Day

After reviewing our options, we put two items on the agenda for today, the Copenhagen Aquarium (Den Blå Planet) and the famous downtown Tivoli Gardens. The latter, is one of the worlds oldest amusement parks, and apparently provided inspiration for Walt who visited before creating Disneyland.

We’d been told by the Swiss biking family that we shouldn't bother with public transportation in Copenhagen because it is such an awesome city to bike through, "best in the world." With that in mind, we hopped on the empty bikes for the few kilometer's ride towards the water and the aquarium. (Interesting fact, no place in Denmark is more than 30 miles from water. Perhaps because of this, learning to swim is compulsory at all public schools.)

Even with our frequent trips back home to the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium, we really enjoyed our visit to “The Blue Planet.”  The kids squeezed through the crowd to to see the sea otter feeding (I was preoccupied uploading photos and in total awe at the lightning fast WiFi connection). Definite highlights were the acrylic tunnel through the enormous tank with hammerhead sharks, manta and stingrays, and the Amazon River exhibit with a huge school of eerily stationary Piranas.

After a few hours investigating the aquarium, we took a tip from our visit in Hamburg and headed back to the hostel for a midday break. Dex and Kylie, though happy to be “home,” were apparently not interested in resting, so we suggested they find the nearby park we’d spied during our walk to dinner the night before. It was a successful mission, and they were even back before the agreed upon 6:00 p.m. curfew.

As advertised, Copenhagen is truly an incredible place to ride a bike. (Bonus trivia, there are more than twice as many bikes in Denmark than cars -- 4.2 vs 1.8 million). On practically every street, there are dedicated bike lanes. If there are parked cars, they are to the left of the bike lane (between the bikes and road way); at busy intersections there are dedicated left hand turn lanes including a smaller set of traffic lights, which often turn green before the ones for cars.

Tivoli Gardens was great. We finally got there around 7:45, and leaned our bikes up against one of the big walls around the park and next to the sidewalk with the other bikes. There didn't seem to be a single main entrance, but, instead, a series of small gates just like a big city park. The one we chose had two automated ticket machines, where we debated which tickets to buy -- the ones for $50 each including access to all rides or the ones for $17 giving access to the park, but no rides. The kids were awesome and agreed to the $17 tickets. Our having recently been to the incredible Europa Park helped make that choice more palatable, plus the park would be closing in a few hours anyway.

All in all, it was great fun -- we bought some sweets for our visit to Bjorn's house the next day, found some pizza for dinner, did a couple midway-type horse races, tested our balancing skills on the big wooden spools in the grassy park, and filled out our pin collections with Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian flag pins. Unlike modern amusement parks spread out over vast areas, Tivoli is incredibly compact adding to it's Old World charm.

Eventually, the kids found a playground while Meg and I relaxed nearby, enjoying the lights just coming on around the small lake.  At 10:45, the nightly water and light show started.  It was a prefect evening.  

We were relieved to see our bikes still outside.  The key to the bike lock we'd been carrying since Spain, bounced out of the lock on the second to last riding day, so we used our bungee cords and bike helmets as a poor man's deterrent.  Almost as much as the park, I loved the five mile ride back to the hostel.  With the address plugged into the phone and the bike light on, we simply pedaled in the cool air in our own lane, all the way back to our home for the night.