EV7: Day 23, 24, 25: Malmö, Copenhagen to Mannheim

We had one complete day for visiting Malmö. It’s a rather modern city, but we absolutely loved the cycling infrastructure here! There are so many dedicated bike lanes here, it’s beautiful. And there are plenty of people making use of them. 😊

Of course the same is true for Copenhagen, which is located right across the Öresund strait.

Originally or plan was to travel home from Copenhagen by train. There is an ICE going Hamburg, and then one from Hamburg to Mannheim. The website says that both of them carry bicycles. But when you try to book you get an error message. When we called the hotline, we were told that a) it is not possible to make bicycle reservations on international trains, and b) the train from Hamburg to Mannheim doesn’t allow bicycles at all. 😑

So the next best option was to book a FlixBus coach going directly from Copenhagen to Mannheim. The pros were the cheap price, direct connection and the proper bicycle carriers on the back of the coach. The big con was being stuck like a sardine in a can for almost 18 h.

So we booked the bus leaving at 22:00 in the evening, so we took the train across the Öresund bridge (unfortunately cycling is not allowed) had the whole Thursday to explore Copenhagen. We had been there for New Year’s Eve one and a half years ago, but it was beautiful to see the city in the summer, too.

We had a luggage allowance of 1 suitcase and 1 hand luggage each. But as I only had the smaller bike panniers, we wrapped them together using cellophane to form 2 luggage pieces. But when the bus came, nobody cared and checked how many luggage pieces were booked. So that’s some trouble we could have saved ourselves. 😉

The bus ride was exhausting, but not too terrible. Fortunately we didn’t get stuck in a traffic jam, and effectively only were late by 45 minutes, as the drivers didn’t know the right route to the bus stop in Bremen and Dortmund.

Finally back home again. But for me it’s only a short stop before I embark to my next trip to Bucharest, Romania - while Dani has to go back to work.