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Holiday logistics sanity checks
I know I have a number of Scandinavian readers and a number of readers with reasonable experience in eastern Europe, so I'll ask here.
There are two things I'd like to do this year: a few hundred miles of cycle touring somewhere around Denmark-ish, and some standard city-hopping-by-train backpacking in Ukraine: Lviv, Kiev, either Yalta or Odessa, Kamyanets-Podilsky if I can figure out how to get there.
I was thinking Denmark at Easter and Ukraine in the summer, but the more I look the more it seems sensible to do them the other way round; Ukraine in August is clearly very hot and the south coast covered from Odessa to Mariupol with every Russian in Russia taking their summer holiday, whilst Denmark in April seems perhaps on the blusterous side, and plotting crazy cycling in August gives me four months of English spring weekends in which to improve my cycling stamina. Am I missing something critical?
Is there anyone reading this with knowledge of the area who can suggest whether it would be more fun to cycle from Copenhagen down to Lubeck, Kiel, Flensburg, Odense, back to Copenhagen, or to go across to Malmo and up the east coast of Sweden to Stockholm, which looks as if it could be done as ten fifty-mile days (though I need better-than-Google maps to see how near to the coast you can go and how you can avoid the E22), then jump on a train back?
Are there likely to be problems with taking a hired bike across the Denmark-Sweden or Denmark-Germany border?
There are two things I'd like to do this year: a few hundred miles of cycle touring somewhere around Denmark-ish, and some standard city-hopping-by-train backpacking in Ukraine: Lviv, Kiev, either Yalta or Odessa, Kamyanets-Podilsky if I can figure out how to get there.
I was thinking Denmark at Easter and Ukraine in the summer, but the more I look the more it seems sensible to do them the other way round; Ukraine in August is clearly very hot and the south coast covered from Odessa to Mariupol with every Russian in Russia taking their summer holiday, whilst Denmark in April seems perhaps on the blusterous side, and plotting crazy cycling in August gives me four months of English spring weekends in which to improve my cycling stamina. Am I missing something critical?
Is there anyone reading this with knowledge of the area who can suggest whether it would be more fun to cycle from Copenhagen down to Lubeck, Kiel, Flensburg, Odense, back to Copenhagen, or to go across to Malmo and up the east coast of Sweden to Stockholm, which looks as if it could be done as ten fifty-mile days (though I need better-than-Google maps to see how near to the coast you can go and how you can avoid the E22), then jump on a train back?
Are there likely to be problems with taking a hired bike across the Denmark-Sweden or Denmark-Germany border?
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As for biking in Scandinavia. I'd say it depends on what kind of bike trip you wish to have. Culture or nature? How are you going to sleep and eat? Biking in Denmark has advantage of low topography and high settlement density. Biking in Sweden has the advantage of being considerably more nature-oriented and that no one cares where you pitch the tent as long as you stay off someone's lawn.
Following the coast in East Sweden isn't that simple, because the coast line is rather broken. I probably would choose an inland route past Karlskrona. The highland zone is quite beautiful.
Still, if I had to choose I probably would take the Danish-German route.
Or perhaps this alternative. Scania is rather good for biking, especially the east side. You could do more of an eight-route using the islands. You could bike from Copenhagen, take the ferry between Helsingör and Helsingborg, go north around the coast to say, Höganäs, across Scania to somewhere like Åhus, follow the coast down to Ystad, take the ferry to Bornholm, spend a pair of nights on that rather interesting island with its seven towns, then take the ferry from Bornholm back to Copenhagen and do another loop on Danish islands to visit say Odense. Again, it depends partially on what you'd like to see.
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