The Sketch
Our third full day in Denmark, and time for a slight change of pace. Both days so far had been all urban caching – pounding city streets backwards and forwards. The change of scenery was to head to the seaside. OK, it wasn’t very far away. This was the only day where we didn’t use the Metro on the way out. But it was the seaside nevertheless. Our plan was to walk along Amager Strand.
For the uninitiated, Amager is an island immediately to the south of Copenhagen. In fact, the southern end of Copenhagen is on Amager. The northern part is on the much larger island of Sjælland. So Amager contains the southern part of Copenhagen, 2-3 suburban towns/districts and an airport. It also contains on its western side an area of reclaimed land that was never good enough for agriculture, but is now the hub for new large buildings. It sticks out in much the same way that Canary Wharf does when you’re in London. Only more so. Amager is also the most densely populated island in Denmark.
On its eastern side, Amager has the Amager Strandpark – a waterside location that’s been a public park for 90 years and which had an artificial island added 20 years ago. That island was the main focus of our walk.
Getting There
From our hotel, the bottom end of Amager Strand was about 2 km away. It wasn’t wasted walking though, because we were able to plot a route that passed a bunch of geocaches. So that’s what we did. We eventually reached the waterside at Kastrup Marina – a nice little facility surrounded by concrete piers, some of which had geocaches hidden on them.
From here we picked our way north to the very bottom end of Amager Strand. A small incident befell me there, where I somehow managed to get a splinter in my right thumb. It hurt quite a lot and, what’s worse, we didn’t even find the cache I was searching for at the time. We lost a few minutes here while I got some tweezers out of my bag and both of us tried to gently wiggle the splinter out. Ami was ultimately successful, but I’d like to think I played some part in it too.
Kastrup Fort
Last year there’d been a mega event in Copenhagen, and it was actually held close to Amager Strand inside Kastrup Fort. The fort itself is somewhat less developed than The Citadel or many others round here, but it’s the same general sentiment. At this one, there’s an encircling wall, two big humps in the middle, and a couple of buried buildings that were probably barracks and/or explosives stores.
For the event they’d filled up the area with new Adventure Labs as well as adding to the existing number of “proper” caches. Some of the labs have their stages laid out in the shape of a heart, but I’m not sure why because you can’t see the individual stages in many apps, so the effect is probably lost. However, all of these could be done from inside the fort. When I realised this, it saved 2-3km of walking around the actual locations. Some of them were over water, so “swimming round” was avoided too. The hour we spent in the fort moved the caching numbers on greatly, and that made up for the fact that the place was crawling with school kids. I mean, hundreds of them, all running around and enjoying themselves.
So in the fort I think I found 26 lab stages and two more traditional caches. Cool.
Time for a Break
We’d been going for 3 hours by this point and it was a sunny day again. It wasn’t as warm as it had been on Sunday, but it was warm enough.
We left Kastrup Fort and meandered onto the artificial island. Where we walked on, there’s a watersports centre that sells drinks and snacks and which has an outdoor seating area. So we grabbed drinks and then I offered Ami the opportunity to sit and read for a bit while I walked around the southern tip of the island clearing up all the caches. There were 11 to do, I think, and I was thinking it wouldn’t bode well for later in the day if Ami came round that bit. So she sat with her book and I went for a walk. I didn’t re-try the splinter-giving cache, but I found all the others easily enough.
When I got back to meet Ami I say for a few more minutes to give my own legs a little rest, before we headed off up the beach.
Stranded
From the watersports centre we had maybe 2km more to walk to the top end of the artificial island. That would be 2km of “as the crow flies”, and of course we are famously not crows. So our route was closer to 4 km as we zigged and zagged our way from side to side of the island that is Amager Strand, halfway over bridges, and generally all over the place.
Along this stretch was a mix of traditional caches, some letterboxes (Woo-hoo! A new icon) and two more sets of 10 labs that belonged to that previous year’s mega event. Most were easy and couple be accessed easily from the concrete path / bicycle route that runs up the island. A couple required venturing into the dunes. Pretty much all were easily found until we reached the top end, where there was a not-a-Scooby job. There also wasn’t a cafe at the top end, which was a shame. We were both ready for another break.
I’d got it into my mind that this could easily be a 100-finds day, but at the top end of the beach I started to think my legs wouldn’t hold out. We were somewhere up in the 70’s, but getting the extras looked like more walking than I was going to manage. So anyway, we walked off the beach towards some busy streets, assuming there’d be a cafe. There was indeed a cafe, so we sat inside and had a decent sandwich each.
Meh!
Ultimately I decided that rather than pushing to exhaustion, I’d just stop. It had been a good enough day anyway, and Ami didn’t look like she wanted to walk any more. Plus if we’d continued it would just be trudging around suburban streets. So we decided not to bother.
Instead we made the relatively short walk to Øresund Metro Station and then caught a metro three stops home to Kastrup.
We’d both had enough, so we just crashed on the beds for three hours before getting cleaned up and then popping next door to Cafe Le Perr again for dinner.
By the standards of Sunday and Monday it had been a short day, but we’d still walked a considerable distance and found a tidy heap of caches.
