Rest day at Fjerritslev

I have met a few bike tourers already, and parents of others. When I meet them, the conversations goes very similarly, where I am going, where they are going etc. But the most common topic of all is the topic of distance. Everyone seems to be keen on telling how far they have been travelling every day, which is very admirable in most cases, but also rather uninteresting. Some people took very different routes than I did, but the description I get is usually “it was great” or “it was beautiful”. The nicest conversation I had so far was with two lovely ladies from Netherlands. We talked about the sheep, the cows, the kartofler stalls and weird military installations on the North Sea coast that are surprisingly easy to go inside by mistake. Since we met on the sandy road near Bovbjerg, they even suggested that I take the beach road from Blokhus to Løkken where it’s possible to ride a bike on the beach; the unit of exchange was experiences, not kilometres.

I suppose it’s unreasonable to demand meaningful descriptions about apparently featureless countryside from every stranger, but I can’t help but miss the essence of a trip like this where one is quite literally travelling over vast open landscapes. There must be more to this than distances. But I am not quite sure what it is yet. Maybe I’ll figure it out as I go.

Tomorrow it’s going to rain as it seems like, maybe this time I shouldn’t wait for it to stop.

Fjerritslev, Denmark