Rolling on: To Rodding

August 24, 2016

Dea's parents, inspired, I hope, by my talk, rode with us on the bicycle path out of Grindsted. They accompanied us for a few kilometres along the trail where Dea had ridden horses as a child. It was another beautiful summer's day.

We said farewell at the end of the path, Dea's parents turned around, and then Dea and I continued on alone. We were heading south towards a special high school in Rodding, where I'd been invited to repeat my talk by a teacher named Jakob. Along the way I had an unexpected chance to practice. As I cycled by a field a cows for some reason they all started to follow me, and by the time I was at the end of the field a large crowd of them had gathered. To amuse Dea (and myself) I started giving them my speech. Before I'd got too far into it, however, the cows started to lose interest. Some turned away, others started eating, one even took to showing her disinterest by urinating. It wasn't too good for my confidence.

"So I decided I had to do it all by bicycle and boats..."

We reached the high school by mid-afternoon and were met by a very nice man with frizzy hair, called Jakob. By coincidence he was both a friend of Dea's sister's boyfriend and also a reader of this very blog, and so he'd extended this invitation to me to come and talk at the school. It was a special type of voluntary boarding school thing that they have in Denmark, where students can pay to go for a year and learn whatever they want. Jakob was teaching an outdoor class, and was planning on taking this year's students (who had only just arrived) on bicycle tours. I was therefore here to provide some inspiration to them, I suppose. But my talk would be given the next morning, and first there was the important business of playing games. Being a reader of my blog, Jakob understood how important this was to me, and we played volleyball and table-tennis together, until he had to go off and organise a challenge for the new students. They would be divided into teams, given some wood and some water balloons, and have to construct catapults to fire on each other. "You can watch if you want?" Jakob said.

"Watch? I want to play!"

So Dea and I were allowed to take part, helping to construct and fire the water-balloon catapults. Terribly good fun it was too.

I didn't take a picture of the water-balloon catapults though, so here is one of the empty volleyball court. It's for your viewing pleasure

But this was supposed to be a business trip, and the next morning I gave my speech again. Having done it once already in front of 500 students, the eight or nine that I had to do it for this time was a little less intimidating. But everything went fine, by which I mean they laughed at most of my jokes. After the talk we all went on a bike ride together to a nearby shelter where there was a very constructive Q&A with plenty of interest and questions. That made me feel pretty good. So did receiving my payment. For the two one-hour talks I'd given I was paid a lot of money, more than I'd spent in eleven weeks cycling across Canada actually. Denmark was alright by me.

Dea and Jakob chat during our bike ride with the class

Today's ride: 55 km (34 miles)
Total: 57,283 km (35,573 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	7
Comment on this entry	Comment	0