Copenhagen Walk and Away

This morning (Wednesday, August 8th), we went out around nine and walked into the pedestrianized area of the old town, stopping for a roll, cheese, orange juice and coffee each at a Cafe Baresso, a chain something like Starbucks. We got all the way to Nyhavn (New Harbor), a cute area with brightly colored buildings, bars, restaurants, old sailing boats and tour boats. Then we returned to our hotel the Cabinn Central) and checked out.

Cabinn is a Danish chain with an odd but successful idea. Why not keep rates cheap by providing a room that is like a cabin on a cruise ship: tiny, with bunk beds and a bathroom that consists almost entirely of the shower, which doesn't have a separate floor? This strange hotel gets reasonably good reviews on Tripadvisor and is recommended in most of the guidebooks. At first Mary Joy was skeptical, and feared that I would fall out of the narrow top bunk and break my neck. However, I survived and we got a good night's sleep.

We bought a ham and cheese baguette at the station. We had by then spent Icelandic and Danish money without seeing a bill or coin, thanks to the wonders of plastic. It is a very good thing that our new Visa card has a security chip embedded in it, because everywhere we used it in Iceland and Denmark required such a chip, though some places would accept a PIN number instead, and I had that as well. All European credit cards now have these chips. U.S. banks have been slow to adopt them, because it would mean changing all the card-readers. But eventually they will have to do so.

Our train ride back to the airport was uneventful, but EasyJet's suggestion that we be there two hours ahead of our flight proved to be a good one. We were there at 11:05 for our 12:45 flight, and since the security lines were very long, we had no time to spare for visiting the WC or buying water. And since EasyJet was one of the first budget airlines to charge for everything, we were expecting to have to buy water aboard, which we did: a small bottle for 2 euros.

The flight got into Basel early, around 2:15. Normally, in the past, we have tried to avoid checking luggage, but on this trip, since we are carrying hiking sticks, we've checked one bag each all the way, and found that to be much less of a hassle than lugging our full-sized carry-on bags around airports and onto planes. After picking up these bags, we went out through the French gate (the airport is actually in France, rather than in Switzerland) instead of the Swiss gate, waited twenty minutes for the navette (shuttle bus) to the nearby St. Louis railway station (8 minutes) bought our train ticket from the machine, and caught the 2:30 train for Colmar.