From Switzerland, Copenhagen is a 1.5 hour jaunt north, after a train ride to Zurich. Mel and I once planned to fly to Copenhagen a few Aprils ago via Amsterdam, until a KLM strike torpedoed that plan just like the HDMS Peder Skram did to those summer houses in Denmark back in 1982. Granted it was an accident – the Danish apparently refer to the incident as the ‘Whoopsie Missile’ – and KLM was a planned strike, but still. We never did get our money back or satisfy our yearning for quaint Copenhagen.

I’d been there once, years ago, with Susannah, on a shoestring budget – a very frayed shoestring, really, where I needed to pay for coffee with coins and choose between beer or food in the evenings.

This would be different. Mel and I snagged cheap-ish flights, dined on mimosas and macaroni in the Zurich airport lounge, and then gate-checked our bags in exchange for a 6 franc voucher to the Swiss Airlines dining service, Saveurs. Already the trip was off to a great start.

We touched down in Copenhagen a little before 3pm and researched transportation options while waiting for our bags to appear on the carousel. The Copenhagen Card was the ticket. For about 150 USD, the card would transport us around Copenhagen via metro, train, bus – even canal tourboat! – and grant us access to numerous attractions.

Cards purchased, bags collected – and we were off! The metro ride from the airport to our hotel in Christianshavn, called Kanalhuset, was a mere 18 minutes. We emerged from the underground into a busy square, then turned left and walked along a leafy canal for six minutes. Our cases clattered over cobblestones. Yellow leaves drifted down from trees in front of us. Cyclists rattled by. Some people love Paris in the springtime, but I love Scandinavia in the fall.

Mel scored us a super-cute hotel. I knew it was a good one when the woman checking us in said that we could have all of our questions answered at any time if we just came up to the bar. And this was an adorably charming bar: plush armchairs and couches, mosaic tables, and windows overlooking yellow-leafed trees and the canal. Sigh.

But we were not destined for our hotel bar that night. After dropping our things and freshening up, we headed to Tivoli Gardens, which I’m hesitant to label a “theme park” because it sounds tackier than it really is. The last time I was in Copenhagen, I glimpsed Tivoli through the iron gates because I could not afford to go in.

This time, we handed our Copenhagen cards over to the woman at the gate, who looked us both up and down and said, “Just so you know, you can only enter once with this card.”

Clearly she thought we were enthusiasts (or children at heart, which isn’t far off), but how could we help it? We entered the park beneath archways decorated with Jack o’Lanterns and twinkling lanterns, and all around us were hay bales and scarecrows and probably thousands and thousands of pumpkins. Thousands. Some were piled up next to wooden carts. Some were piled up in gardens. Some were so enormous they can only have been genetically modified.

The gargantuan pumpkins were protected from the public (and us) by an iron fence, because they were part of a display of scarecrows with pumpkin heads elaborately dressed and sitting in a gazebo while spooky Danny Elfman music played from the speakers. We spent a good several minutes here, both on the way in and back out.

We explored the winding pathways with hot cider and an interest in finding the wooden roller coaster, which is very old and apparently was once ridden by the queen of Denmark when she was in her 80s, to celebrate her Golden Jubilee. This made me feel at once safe and a part of something historic – a wooden roller coaster. We thought it was the oldest wooden coaster in the world, but Google amends that it’s one of the oldest still in operation.

If you’re ever searching for it, it’s all the way around the back of the park by a mountain that looks like the Matterhorn. The roller coaster is called the Rutschebanen. Finding it was difficult, but not as difficult as finding a place to return our plastic cider cups to get our depot back. (Sidenote: At events in Switzerland, if you get a drink in a hard plastic cup, you pay extra – usually 2 CHF – to ensure the cup comes back. You bring the cup back to wherever you got a drink and they give you your 2 CHF back.)

Mel got in line while I tried to figure out where to bring the cups. Everyone kept pointing me around a corner, so eventually I gave up and joined Mel in the line, where we both struggled to buy tickets for the roller coaster using the QR code. In the end, we bungled the whole thing and ended up buying two sets of tickets. Oh, darn. I guess we’ll just have to ride it twice.

Tickets were something like $8 per person, and it was worth it. Mel tucked our plastic cups in her coat pocket and we hopped in a little car with a dubious lap bar. Riding the coaster with us was a brakeman. That’s right. Apparently he controls the speed of the train – and I guess makes sure we stop instead of crashing into the platform? – and he gets to ride it over and over and over again.

We weren’t sure what to expect, so it was with pure joy and exhilaration that we found ourselves rocketed through pitch black tunnels, up hills with views of the whole park, and back down steep drops. We even passed some stuffed polar bears. There was much to see!

Wobbly legged and giddy with excitement, we got off the roller coaster and went to try to find the cup depot again. We did: it’s a machine. Here I thought Switzerland was leading the way in sustainable, efficient systems, but Denmark just soared past in the last lap. A machine! You put your cup in, slide a door down, and the cup disappears and a Danish kronor pops out!

We returned to the roller coaster even more excited than before. The man scanning our tickets laughed at us. We laughed back. There was so much laughing! Like, so much. The Tivoli website describes this coaster as providing “shriek-inducing drops”, but Mel and I were definitely leaning more uncontrollable laughter. Interestingly, the second trip through seemed to skip the polar bears. A Google search confirms that there is only one track, so…I guess we were just too excited to notice them.

We wound back through the park to get a glimpse of Halloween heaven at night, and it did not disappoint. I felt like I’d wandered into a Tim Burton movie, and I was very okay with that. Christmas gets a lot of love. Halloween deserves more. Tivoli pulled out all the stops, so five out of five stars, Tivoli!

Afterwards, we walked to the meatpacking district to visit War Pigs, a barbecue place with craft beer on tap. It was a cool vibe – and there were veggie options – and we sat at two stools in the window eating delicious food off nordicware metal trays.

The next morning, I woke and went for a run around the canals, and then we had breakfast at the hotel and started the day. We wandered around the parks, down the promenade to the Little Mermaid statue, and then back to Nyhavn to hop on a boat tour of the canals. Our tour guide was a Danish man named Morton with a very dry sense of humor. He seemed a little prickly at first, but after his first joke landed a guffaw from an American woman, he loosened up.

Thanks to him, I learned that Denmark law protects a person’s access to the shore – so restaurants can’t set up fancy, exclusive patios; access to the shoreline needs to be unimpeded. He told us about people jumping off the opera house in the summer, that Gasoline Grill has been rated best burger in Denmark and 9th in all of Europe, and that the Little Mermaid statue has consistently been voted 2nd most disappointing tourist attraction in Europe (the first is the Manneken Pis in Belgium).

It was a sunny day and coasting through the canals for an hour and a half was a great way to see the city, including the low bridges we all had to duck to fit under. Afterwards, we realized we hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and we had dinner reservations at Sanchez in Vesterbro, a Michelin-star Mexican restaurant, at 5:45. We figured we’d have a little wine and cheese somewhere in town to tide us over, but we ended up with a flatbread and an enormous, uneatable platter of cheese and meats.

We left feeling fuzzy with wine – the bartender had also mistakenly poured me a Sauvignon when I ordered a Riesling and he was very heavy-handed – but also a little full. We were hoping we’d find our appetites – and we did.

Sanchez was unreal. I’m not a person who dines at Michelin star restaurants so I really have no idea how it compares to anywhere else, but damn. The food was amazing, again and again. We ordered the tasting menu, and we were served a variety of colorful and delicious dishes. Bonus: every one of them paired well with our Mezcal margaritas. Yum!

We moved to the bar around 9 and had another margarita before sauntering back to the hotel. In the morning, I got up extra early to get my run in, because we were doing something especially exciting.

I ran in the dark all the way down to the Little Mermaid statue, and then I went farther to see the Genetically Modified Little Mermaid, an interesting creature that hangs out in an industrial canal but looks pretty cool.

I made it back to the hotel by 7:40, and joined Mel and a woman from our hotel upstairs in the bar. We were going for a “morning swim”, which we’d seen advertised on the hotel website a week before. After a 20-minute walk to the canal, we found ourselves at a little pool that was sort of sanctioned off from the canal, but whose water filtered in from the canal. It was cold. The sun peeked out once and then disappeared.

We made our way in with a number of other women, and stood around chatting. Once we were plunging, we felt pretty okay, apart from our frigid toes. One woman in there was an open water swimmer, used to 8-10 hour swims. I tried not to interrogate her too much.

After the plunge, I was shivering. Mel had a thick flannel and kindly added her coat on top of my coat, though my teeth were still rattling away in my mouth. They opened a bottle of Fernet and we all raised our glasses, and then we downed some coffee, which sort of warmed me up. There were also cookies, but the most exciting part of all was coming next. On the website, it said that we’d swim, and then have coffee and a morning song to wake up. I couldn’t wait.

“Should we skip the song this morning?” wondered our hotel guide.

“No!” said her friend, and they passed out songbooks. “Would you like to sing in Danish or English?”

“Danish!” we all cried.

So there we were, 7 women huddled on a public swimming pool, singing “Danse i Måneskin”. You can give it a listen yourself here. One of the women singing with us fondly recalled listening to the song as a child, and the first comment on the YouTube video clip reads “What a beautiful song, Trine. You have helped the entire population of Denmark”, with 22 likes. I need to translate these lyrics.

Despite the singing, the alcohol, the caffeine, and the cookies, I could not stop chattering. A hot shower was needed, so we went back to the hotel where I took one and then ordered the biggest breakfast they had on offer.

Over food, we planned to take the train out of the city to the art museum Louisiana. When it comes to museums, I’m more of a history museum kind of person, but we were told that the grounds are beautiful and there were some cool exhibits, so off we went!

The train ride was lovely, and after a brief walk through suburbia, we arrived at the museum. We explored some of the exhibits, but our favorite one was a mirrored room with lots of lights, possibly inspired by the artist’s time in Tokyo and New York. The artist was Yayoi Kusama, and we were permitted one whole minute in the room and limited to 4 people only, which was actually quite nice. I was wondering why I seemed drawn to Japanese artists – there’s an exhibit at the Beyeler Foundation now that I’m keen to see, also a Japanese artist – when I realized that it’s the same artist. The Beyeler just opened an exhibit on Yayoi Kusama. How cool is that?

Mel snagged us some amazing seats in the museum restaurant, right against the glass looking out over the sea (or a canal, I’m not sure, or maybe a strait). We enjoyed juices and delicious food – a tasty sandwich for Mel and a vegetarian carrot tartare for me – and then wandered around a bit longer before heading back to the city. We shopped, we walked, we dodged the rainy mist.

Mel suggested popping into a craft brew place, so we found a good one nearby and escaped from the rain into a basement-ish, golden-looking bar with lots of tasty beers on taps and a warm ambiance. After drinks, we headed for our last dinner of the trip, at a place called Gaarden and Gaden, which was fine. (Apologies, but nothing really comes close to Sanchez.)

In the morning, I ran to the beach to catch the sunrise and Mel headed into town to a cool parkour spot. We reconvened at the hotel bar, packed our things, and made for the airport.

I like getting to the airport like a full day before my flight, and Mel humored me by joining. We rationalized that there was a cool bar we’d passed when we landed that had lots of beers on tap, and we found it again: Mikkeller.

We ordered two beers and settled into our stools, only to notice two plaques on the bar, each with a man’s name printed in the center. Apparently, these two men have traveled to all parts of the world that serve Mikkeller and drank Mikkeller. They proved this with stamps in a Mikkeller passport. Mel and I searched them up on Instagram only to learn that one of them had been at this exact bar exactly two hours earlier.

“There was a flight out to the Faroe Islands this morning,” the bartender explained when Mel asked her. “For a beer convention. So yeah, he would have been here.”

Determined to get our names on the bar, we left with a nice buzz and two Mikkeller passports. All in all, it was a perfect 72 hours in a quaint place I’ll definitely return to, if only to get the rest of the Mikkeller stamps.