The Bridge

I (Annie) set off from Hamburg with two friends, headed for Copenhagen. This included taking the lovely Puttgarden to Rodbyhavn ferry, Germany to Denmark.

We were meeting a friend in Copenhagen later in the day, so with time on our hands we decided to overshoot and pop to Sweden. The bridge / tunnel combo connecting Copenhagen and Malmo is fantastic, and we all wanted to see it. We stopped in Malmo for a really great lunch, then headed back into Copenhagen to meet up.

Later that afternoon, one of our party realised they’d lost their passport. We all four combed her bags and every inch of the car - nothing. We looked up the process of emergency travel papers, which would take 2 working days to complete (we leave on Sunday). We also thought back to all the places we’d visited since we last knew we had it (going in to Sweden).

And so it was that I headed back over the bridge into Sweden on the off chance that I could find the passport where it could have been dropped. Bound to be a doomed mission, but we would have always wondered otherwise. I also got a chance to see this space age water tower lit beautifully at night, having admired it in the daytime.

Imagine my surprise and bewilderment when I got to my first stop, the busy multi-storey car park where we’d stopped and charged the car over lunch, and there was the passport lying on the ground in a parking bay. It was shiny gold side up, and couldn’t have looked more obviously like a passport on the ground if it tried. I phoned the others (who’d stayed behind mainly because we couldn’t smuggle her back into Sweden passport-less) and many, many celebrations were had.

Incredible it was still in the same place several hours later. We have bought a lottery ticket tonight.

I got back (4th time over the bridge), and had a lovely Prosecco and gossip with them. All mightily relieved.

“What did you do in Denmark on your first day there?”; “Well, I went twice to Sweden…”