Summer vacation 2018 - alone in Copenhagen - and some rantings about the grass on the other side of the fence

This will be a boring post, hence I have procrastinated it a bit. I still want to make this blog entry to make my vacation blogging complete - there is a two week gap after my Kastrup post.

This photo is one of the very few I took from our harbour in Copenhagen - by the wharf Jacob Jenssens Bådeværft + Sails Support. In the harbour there were two sunken wooden boats. Our boat Solveig stayed there totally for four weeks because I wanted professional help to fix things - only in the very last week they actually had time to do something. In the end they even claimed harbour fee. How fair is that? (Then again, I got a good discount on the harbour fee, and we would have had to pay some harbour fee anyway as our plan was to leave the boat behind in Copenhagen).

Photo taken by tobixen - position: geo:55.724407,12.603824 - 2018-08-02 11:40:44 localtime - CC BY-SA 4.0 - full quality

We arrived to Copenhagen Monday two weeks ago (I should have been in Oslo that Monday actually - but I got my vacation extended with an extra week), after sailing to Amsterdam and back again; the rest of my family continued to Russia by flight. So I was left alone ... my plan was to clean the boat, give it some varnish, work a bit and get home and back to my office job. At work, or on vacation ... it didn't really matter, I was so much looking forward for being alone for some time - to have plenty of time that I could just spend for whatever. I also had grand visions for how much cleaning, varnishing and maintenance on the boat I would manage to cover - and I was also planning to get lots of computer work done during the time.

It's incredible how fast the time passed. I was expecting to return to the office during the week - but in the end I returned home to Oslo late Sunday evening. Cleaning the boat and giving it one layer of varnish, it shouldn't take that long time, should it? The worst thing was that I didn't even manage to complete those two tasks.

Just such a simple thing as the laundry took me the better parts of a whole day, with all the bedclothes, towels and clothes. The washing machine was small, others wanted to do laundry as well, and there were many things that couldn't be combined in the same wash - like white and colored stuff, my wife don't want me to wash the textiles I've been using for cleaning the floor together with towels, underwear, etc ... so I even had to go there in the middle of the night to get everything done. Travel time from my harbour to Tuborg harbour where the washing machine was, around ten minutes one way with the dhingy (I will cover Tuborg in another post).

I got done many other tasks on my list ... like delivering one of the bikes to a bike service and picking it up from there, fixing some problems with the navigation lights on the dhingy, installing some more interior light in the boat and fixing some problems with the existing light ... all "minor" stuff that shouldn't take so much time, but it all adds up. I spent quite some time cooking also; the fridge was full of things that needed to be eaten up, and most of it needed to be prepared. I rarely do cooking nowadays, either my wife makes food, or I buy something from the street, or I just do something very simple, like pre-sliced bread with pre-sliced salami or heating up a frozen pizza in the oven.

I went swimming three times (once for a longer swim, twice I just went right outside the harbour with the dhingy and went swimming for some 10-15 minutes), one long biking trip (my internet connection on the phone didn't work as it should - and I discovered that without google maps, I'm hopefully lost when biking in Copenhagen), dined out twice, and spent some time by the laptop catching up emails and work ... but except for that, most of the time went working with the boat.

What's more ... I started to feel quite ... lonesome being alone in Copenhagen! It was particularly intense when I went for a bike ride Friday evening - there were people everywhere, partying, dining, biking together. There is one thing being lonesome in the middle of nowhere, that's pretty much natural, but to be lonesome in a big city, with lots of people around ... that's much worse.

I always have so much to do, and so little time for doing it. There is my day work, then there is maintenance of the house and boat, family life, housework, other projects, crypto trading, posting on Steem, catching up the posts from the profiles I follow on steem - and I'm often dreaming about just going out sailing ... without any need to return home to some particular date. During the last few years I've been earning more on crypto (mostly on riding the arbritrages - particularly local buyers/sellers willing to pay some commission for a quick trade with a trustworthy person) trading than on my regular day work. The idea of simply quitting my work has strafed my mind several times - but do think I would regret doing that. How long would I go on sailing without getting bored from it? How many projects would I be able to complete if I quitted my job? Would I stay motivated to spend my extra free time on housework and maintenance? Maybe not. Even the economical aspect - I don't see myself earning money on trading crypto in some few years time. Heck, even today I'm having problems - the bank account I'm primary using for trading has been frozen for several days now, and I get no answers from the bank on why it's frozen, if the bills that I've stacked up will be paid on time, if the money I've received over the last few days will eventually come to my account or be returned to the sender, and if I will at all get my money back or not. A solid day job brings economical security - and once one has become a family dad with mortage and responsibilities, security is important.

So there I've covered my grass ranting. One may always think that things would have been much better without the day job (if one has that), or with a day job (if one is unemployed), with a family (if one is single) or without the family (when one has a family), but at the end of the day ... it's all wishful thinking, the grass isn't necessary greener at the other side of the fence.

Sunday evening I traveled home. Here is another observation; I had been out in the sailing boat for four weeks. For three of those weeks I had been drinking massive amounts of beer. Except for the last week I had been eating quite some unhealthy food. While being on a boat, one doesn't do that much exercise ... there isn't room for a lot of walking or running while being on the sea. And yet ... when coming home I stepped on the scale, and I could hardly believe my eyes ... 87 kg, that's pretty low for me, there is at least a decade since last time I saw such numbers. Going to work the next day, I climbed the hills without getting out of breath, same with the stairs at work. Is it the work that is killing me? Sitting still by the office desk for more than seven hours a day is hardly healthy - even if I'm trying to stand more than what I'm sitting those days.

I had four working days in Oslo. I took out another vacation day that Friday. Ferry down from Oslo to Copenhagen Thursday evening with arrival Friday morning; managed to do some computer work on the ferry. It was a bit windy; one could feel the waves in the ship, but of course it's usually all quite gentle in such a big ship. Next morning one could see on the wave crests that there was quite a lot of wind outside, but no waves to be felt as we were in the shade of land. I checked the news and read that most ferries between Denmark and Norway was cancelled due to storm.

Some observations - it was really hot, people were bathing and swimming everywhere, and there were no jelly-fishes two weeks ago. This weekend I could still observe quite some people swimming, the sea was still quite warm, but the air felt a lot more chilly, summer is definitively coming to an end - and there were too many jellyfishes in the sea that I bothered to do any swimming.

I managed to finish the cleaning (more or less - didn't get to clean the toilets) and varnishing (paid for 6 hours of assistance from some friend of a friend) Friday to Saturday. My sister-in-law and her family arrived Saturday afternoon - just as I did the finishing touches on the cleaning. They were exhausted after travelling throughout the night, so the first point on their plan was to sleep. Then practicing. It was quite much wind as we were to leave the harbour, so the first point on the checklist was to leave from harbour. I'm not a good teacher, I'm not sure they learned much, but at least they got to do some of the work. Then mooring up in Tuborg harbour (to empty the sewage and do more laundry). Unfortunately the harbour office was open, so we got full assistance from the harbour masters - we lost several minutes of useful practice because of that. Then I "lost" a fender on the sea and they had to rescue it, next it was free sailing and tacking, one more mooring at Tuborg (now without harbour master present) and finally anchoring. Yes, the wharf where we left the boat finally managed to get something done - they fixed at least half of our problems with the anchoring gear, so now we can do anchoring again! We slept by anchor that night right outside Copenhagen. I really enjoy sleeping by anchor, it's such a fantastic freedom - in both meanings of the word "free", as we pay nothing for it! @marygreensmith covered it pretty well in her hanging by a thread post.

Then came Sunday, but that I've already covered in two other posts; Shtandart in Copenhagen and Christiania Bathhouse. After that I went home to Oslo again.

Our boat Solveig hasn't finished her vacation yet. Now she's sailing in Denmark, following Shtandart. After that I have to take her back to Oslo - probably over two weekends again. While I've had four weeks of vacation, Solveig will have had almost four months of vacation totally.

Selected photos available in original quality on IPFS QmXwxf3ABDezkG67KGcLdz3UN1cyqJ5BMedCaJbyBr2fwW. All photos taken available in original quality on IPFS QmWYZFqqzUk57RaZNEFy5thUQMf7QPafbZAeUaNPV1W67H. The CC BY-SA 4.0 license applies on both photos and article