When I saddled up this morning, there was hardly a soul awake around me. Which afforded me some uninterrupted views of the dawn lake, as the sun rose over it. Nice way to have a breakfast. As I'd like to call my somewhat questionable imitation of a cup of coffee.

Once I was on the highway again, I realised i had quite a few extra kilometers to go to make it to the Danish city of Odense, as I had planned. I picked up my pace, only to be slowed down again by the first road works of the day. That would prove to be a theme for the first 250 km, as the German road supervisory board had a veritable cornucopia of delays laid out before me all the way up to the Danish border. Damn.

So it was slow going. I managed to have some fun though. The west passage of Hamburg is a beautiful thing, riding along the harbour with all the big container ships edging up on you. Later on, I made a brief stop at the town of Rendsburg, where the train track actually floats above the houses: see the pics below.

After that, the Danish border. Some fearsome looking border guards were on the lookout for some unnamed border threat, which turned out no to be me, as they waved me through. Somehow I felt lucky.

It surprised me how empty the Danish south turned out to be. Hardly a town in sight. And a definite change of mood. It felt ... simpler, for lack of a better word.

When I finally turned east to enter the island of Funen, the landscape became sowmewhat more populous. The bridge to Funen over the sea strait takes you up to a considerable height, which makes for a magnificent view. Highlight of the day, this is what riding a motorbike is for. Never mind the strong sidewinds that you get on top of the bridge, though I can imagine it's probably best not to take this route when the weather's bad.

And so I made it to Odense, a decent sized harbour city with not much to do, but likeable enough. I've made a little impression of it: https://youtu.be/4tH8G9t8TzA 

Odense's claim to fame is being the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, the fairytale writer. He only lived there until turning 14, after which he ran away to Kopenhagen to never return. So he doesn't seem to have had a particularly strong bond with the place, but in Odense they don't seem to mind, because they've dedicated almost every street corner to him. In my Youtube video you'll catch a nice mural of him.

Off to Sweden tomorrow, see you there!