On my journey back home I think I used every form of transportation on this planet (barring a few a anachronistic exceptions). This path home started in the tiny Danish island of Bornholm. This dot of earth in the Baltic was the escape my partner and I needed after four months apart. Our airBnB host had the same intention when he moved there with his family years before. Phil, our gentle British ex-pat, kicked off our journey home with a pace that matched the rest of the island. He delivered us to the Osterlars (expect that ‘O’ is one of the funny Danish characters with a slash through it) bus station in the front bucket of his bicycle.
We rode the dated Danish bus the 22 km it takes to cross the island in admiration of its bucolic beauty and simplicity. The bus tickets themselves had to be punched per rider by the ticket machine. We loafed around the port city of Ronne and devoured our polse sausages in apprehension of our arriving ferry. The ferry was huge and high-tech. No spared expenses between the Swedes and the Danes. The vessel carried a nautical crew clothes in stripes and sailor caps, some commuters, and a few weekenders like us. We arrived in the Swedish port of Ysted an hour or so later, just in time to catch our cross-country train to Malmo. From Malmo we took another example of Nordic kinship in the cooperative Malmo-Kobenhavn line back into Denmark.
We crashed the night (hardly a night, we slept at midnight and had to wake at 4 am to finish our journey) with my pall Mark, took our final Danish train from Norreport to Kapstrut-Lufthavn to board our flight our flight to London-Gatwick. Here’s were it got a leetle dicey. The London fog was thick that morning — a fact we had to take on faith as we were grounded in Denmark for an extra hour and a half. We hardly had time to validate our pilot when we touched down in England, as our connecting flight’s gate would be closing in 15 minutes from our landing. We became those people in the London-Gatwick airport sprinting through the corridors and barging through security. Sweaty, we safely stowed our carry-on in time for the flight to JFK.
So a recap: Bucket-bike to ferry to train to metro (2x) to plane to plane to automobile home. Gotta love the Danes and their commitment to multi-modal transportation.
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