Wanderung 30

We were up early and saw that a thin layer of fog was just lifting over the small pond down the hill from our room. It was so etherially pretty that we walked down for pictures and a closer look before breakfast. But then we were off on our way to the old Viking city of Ribe.

[Monika] Here we finally had a bike problem. But Bob turns into "Mr. Lucky" - after first being "Mr. Unlucky" !

[Bob] As we rode through a wooded copse, I suddenly felt my bicycle wobble strangely for a moment, and then heard the scrape of the rear wheel rim riding on the pavement. I dismounted, only to see my rear tire was completely flat. I had a spray can with foam goop in my tool kit for fixing flats, so I tried using that to fix it, but the foam came pouring out from the base of the valve on the rear tire, where the tire rim had cut into it, and the tire immediately deflated again. Clearly it was irreparable. So I pushed the bike about 3 kilometers to the next little town, which just happened to have an open bicycle shop, which just happened to have a bike mechanic on duty, who just happened to have both the tire and inner tube required to fit my bike. So we had lunch down the street for an hour while he repaired my bike for about $60 total.
Unbeknownst to me, the black plastic sun visor had popped off my helmet while I was pushing my bike into town. We just happened to choose an Imbiss back down the street for lunch, and I just happened to see the oddly-shaped piece of black plastic as we were walking back to pick up my bike. I just happened to decide the piece might be useful and picked it up to take along, only to later find out that it just happened to be the piece missing from helmet!

When you really think about all the "just happened" connections that day, I really was "Mr. Lucky"! So after very little delay we were back on our bicycles and riding the last few miles to Ribe. Ribe lies on a river that flows a couple miles westward to the North Sea, and it apparently was an important port for the Vikings before and after their Christianization.

We had a room booked at the Danhostel in Ribe which did not open until 4 p.m., so we locked up our bikes and walked around the old section of town for a bit. But our first concern was trying to get train tickets for our trip back to Hamburg two days hence, and thus our first stop was the train station. Unfortunately, the Ribe train station itself was shuttered tight with no sign of a human ticketmaster, but there was a large ticket machine on the train platform instead. Ok, we studied that contraption and after a few minutes, we managed to puzzle out how to order two "person + bicycle" tickets back to Hamburg.

But then the hassle started when we tried to PAY for our tickets. The machine would not accept our credit cards (no chip, no pin), it would not accept either of our ATM cards (foreign banks??), and also would not accept any cash at all except Danish coins! Well, we would have needed about $80 for our tickets to Hamburg, and didn't have anywhere near that amount of Danish change! In the end, we gave up and went to the Visitor Information center, where we found out the nearest station with a human ticketmaster was about 60km away to the North, but that would cost almost as much money as going South to Germany, so we couldn't afford to take the train to the station where we could ask a human to use our credit cards to buy a ticket back to Hamburg! Argh!! What a mess!

But aha, an idea! Maybe we could try to make an end run around the limitations of the ticket machine by using the Internet once we were back at the Danhostel to buy the necessary tickets! Brilliant! For the time being, though, we just gave up and walked around the oldest section of Ribe. There we particularly enjoyed the big old church that stood all alone in a cobblestoned central plaza in the middle of the old town area.

We finally checked in back at the Danhostel about 4 p.m., and then Monika tried the use the Internet to purchase our tickets. But the website was all in Danish and we just couldn't make heads or tails of many details. Monika finally ordered what we thought were the right tickets, but then the website also refused to take our credit cards without any explanation or excuse!! Not only was that aggravating, we were also by this point getting a little desperate because although we could conceivably just ride our bikes back across the border to Germany, the ride would take us a good 2-3 days and that wouldn't leave us any time to see the area around Ribe.

Finally we came up with the thought that if we just got tickets to Niebuell, the first town in Germany where we had to switch trains anyway, it might be cheap enough to do it with a pocketful of Danish coins. So we went back to the train station and managed to scrape enough coins together between the two of us to buy 1 "person + bicycle" ticket to Niebuell. Now at least we knew it was possible and we knew just how many more coins we needed to get the second ticket. We ultimately got the necessary change from the nice people at the desk of the Danhostel the next morning, but all together the level of frustration of this day with the flat tire and uncooperative ticket machine was quite high. It was one of the few days I was glad to have behind me.