Biking from Amsterdam to Copenhagen

Lessons learned while my daughter Eva and I biked and camped for two weeks in The Netherlands, Northern Germany, and Denmark to visit my other daughter, Maya, who is living in Copenhagen. See more details at https://JackBikes.org

When eva and i arrived in the netherlands uh biking just looked absolutely chaotic in the streets like the city of bootsrectier people going every which way unclear how we could fit in and the underground bike parking garages were just overwhelming so many spaces but eva and i emerged from this

Had decided to try our hand at biking in the streets of the netherlands if you do this for the first time consider starting out early in the morning when there’s very little traffic except maybe the occasional delivery vehicle and the delivery cyclist and the mopeds on the bike paths

And just because there’s stoplights don’t assume everyone will follow the rules but if moms and kids can bike around the netherlands and if elderly people could bike around the netherlands then we figured we should be able to too so we got up our courage and tried more cycling

In the bike paths with traffic trying not to hit pedestrians who might be jumping in front of us or delivery trucks parked down to the side overall it was safe especially in the rural areas where your roots might be separated entirely from the road and lots of places had rotaries

Which made it very safe we’d still check several times to make sure we knew whether we had to yield to vehicles or whether they were yielding to us but the rotaries would make things very safe biking around the netherlands was gorgeous and many of the bike paths were

Integrated with the highways or other roads so that you might go underneath them when you’re looking for trails be sure to look underneath as well not in the rural areas it’s very common to see sheep or goats or cattle and on farm roads that are bike paths

You might also see some farm tractors we had a great time cycling around and there were so many paths really the hardest part was navigation i used a tool called map out where i could load a gpx file and find my way even when it was raining it was still beautiful in the

Netherlands made us happy and sometimes you’d see things that would go by so quickly like are there really three kids in that cargo bike we went camping with all of our gear and in the netherlands the nature camp network was fabulous some of those were our favorites

Where we found uh places to camp and with chickens goats and even a cat that fortunately even did not adopt during our journey but you might have thought about it and more chickens and delicious eggs we decided to take a train from zwolle in the netherlands through most of germany and

Many german travelers were taking their bikes on the train as well make sure you get a reservation ahead of time and in germany we went up the northern region and made some new friends here’s helgay our warm showers host and also we went biking for a few hours one day with tariq

Who was stealth camping we also discovered that if you want to ride one of the big ferries you’ve got to get in the car lane and board with the cars and trucks and germany led us up to denmark where we had some just gorgeous weather to bike into copenhagen which was just as

Packed with bicyclists as amsterdam and utrecht were but we had gotten more skills along the way we learned how to uh navigate more traffic with bicyclists and deal with people passing us and making signals to turn and also in copenhagen how to navigate around these beautiful bridges

And even how to pass some of those large cargo bikes by the end of our two-week trip we had developed enough skills and confidence to bike through rush hour even into a crowded friday afternoon food gathering place in copenhagen and cycling around the city with both of my daughters

Eva and maya was living in copenhagen was just fabulous