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This is a multi-post coverage of our England to Denmark Trip on bicycles. The posts include:
You will find these links again at the bottom of the page.
Jake and I cycled from Brighton to Denmark. I think we did the most part of 1200 kilometres in 14 days, minus a couple of minor, and necessary, uses of public transport. After the first week I was looking forward to it ending and naturally now (three weeks later, at time of writing) I am in full time work again and starting to develop the feeling of missing being out there. So, time to start writing. (10.08.22)
(05.10.2022, day of publishing.) I'm not sure what has been more painful. Cycling to Denmark, or writing about it. I have been circling around and around as to what relevance there is for this to be out there in the world. It wasn't even an impressive feat. There's no grand story to tell. I am lost between telling this story properly or not telling it at all and neither option is leaving me feeling satisfied, so instead, in honour of the blog as a format and in the hopes that what I am putting together in this space may at some time serve as a tool or resource for someone, I have put together a few things. Some writing about the trip, some daily documentation and some photographs. Proof that it happened? A reminder to myself that it wasn't all bad, or all that good? Maybe just something to look back on, for the sake of it. What we had was life on the road. Really the same as life in the city or life in the fields. Getting through, working it out, finding joy where you can find it and being thankful for any company at all. Below I outline a bit about the trip, from the planning stages, through to reflections after the trip was finished. You won't find funny moments here, but you can get an idea for that stuff in the other parts of the post. See the links at the top or bottom of the page.
Synopsis:
Conception:
How things came about…(When semen met ovum).
Logistics:
Planning and getting ready, plus some on-the-road logistics
Riding:
Detailing what the route was like, how the riding experience was and how easy/difficult things were.
Reflections:
Some contemplation on the trip in general.
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A. CONCEPTION:
This trip was born uncreatively out of my necessity to get from England To Denmark. Earlier in the year, Julie and I decided to move out of the UK and settle down in her homeland, in order to kind of lay the necessary foundations in which to build a family upon. Popping one of my Christmas ginger cakes in the oven is still a few years off, but we definitely couldn’t start making cakes in the UK with the absence of any family around on top of the general financial demands placed on all individuals who live in London. Really then we had to move to Australia (Come on..) or Denmark, and naturally chose the least diabolical change of the two.
Hiking is great when you are somewhere remote and beautiful. It’s a really connected way to experience the land and the nature around it. Cycling is a great way to cover a lot more distance within the same amount of time, and so the defining thing between the two modes of travel/adventure is pace. You can go from hiking across a small country, to cycling across multiple. Experiencing the changing landscape of a country as you cross it by foot, or experiencing the change in cultures as you cross a continent. The other main difference is competence for terrain. You can’t cycle the GR20. You’ve got to use your arms as well as your legs, there’s just no other way about it. Alternatively, you wouldn’t want to walk from England to Denmark because likely boredom would take you to your grave before you got there.
I found myself with a six month lead-up to finish life as we knew it in the UK, and get on over to start a-fresh in the land of smorrebrod, Omnium and over-indulgence (whilst at the hospitable hand of the in-laws). Needless to say, I knew little of what this transition would look like, and was neither scared, nor excited for it to come about. These kinds of giant chapter changes are not easy. It was going to mark almost everything as I knew it, changing. New country, no job, no plan. The only thing that was to carry over was the quality of my relationships, these would be affected now by the geographical distance. A daunting prospect, but really in the life of a lay-man (unpaid for all adventuring) the perfect occasion to be on the road for a longer period of time. It’s often hard to carve time out of life, in order to experience something outside of the constant rotation of the day-to-day. The getting-through and all the looking-forward. When life is about to give you nothing at all, you better at least make the most of not having a job, of momentarily breaking out of the system that pushes us through life, forward, forward to the end goal… ‘retirement’ / ‘enjoying yourself for the first time in 65 years’. No job, no rent to pay, nothing to do besides prolong the inevitable friction that comes with adaptation to change.Shimmying sideways in a nook, in a cave. Scraping the walls. Not fun, but necessary to get somewhere else.
I thought I’d ride solo, to prove to myself that I could handle the distress of a journey like this on my own and because I thought it was unlikely that anyone would be able to join me. Jake got a hold of the idea sometime in March and said he was coming. When we got serious about making it happen, and even started some preliminary planning, Pietro and Anton got a hold of the idea and said they were also in. I tried to get a lasso around another friend, Will, to complete our Ten-Wheels of Freedom group, but in the end the timing wasn’t right. Anton, fairly, couldn’t say no to some work opportunities that presented at the last minute, Pietro was put into a free-for-all-last-job-standing-fight-to-the-death at his workplace, and Will’s life just thought it would throw enough shit at him to make it all impossible timing. Like that, our Decagon of Dreams became a square. A sad, dreamless square of solitude. Pietro decided to turn our square into a now hydrated hexagon for forty-eight hours, joining us for Dover - Calais, Calais - Ostende, before backtracking and getting back to the office at the start of the new week. More of that to come.
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B. LOGISTICS:
Some iterations of the route took part during planning sessions between Jake, Anton, Pietro and myself, all of which took us generally northeast along the Eurovelo 12 North Sea Route. The EV12 essentially runs SW<--->NE along the coastline of the North Sea, part of a longer distance route stretching from northern Norway down to the south of Spain. Continental breakfast down in the lobby. If you know what I mean.
We started in Brighton, Jake’s POB and current residence, Rode east to Dover. Met lovely Pietro. Ferry to France. Rode north to Belgium. Said goodbye to lovely Pietro. Rode north to The Netherlands, then Germany, and into Denmark. Something like this.
We carried full sleep systems, for sleeping under a tarp, however did not bring cook systems. We knew we’d be by the coast, in semi-densely populated parts of Europe, in the summer season. Warm days, many hours of sunlight, consistent ability to resupply on food and water and so without the need to carry multiple days-worth of food at any one time. The biggest consequence of this, although it keeps your bike lighter and more easily organised, is the need to physically go shopping at a supermarket every day. The route itself is what dictated the demands or lack thereof, for us, and by its nature separated the trip from a ‘bikepacking’ trip and turned it into something more like traditional ‘touring’. This is the major factor that determined the logistics for the trip. We knew we could wing it and probably get by, just by being within proximity to what one might need, when one might need it. The other factor that also played a part was that the route went through countries with very good cycling infrastructure. There was almost always a bike path, if not a separate, quiet, back road; these were mostly well maintained and on top of that was a lack of topographical variation. The route was dead flat after England, all the way until the rolling hills of the southwest of Denmark. Although often choosing to take the path-less-trodden, (single track, gravel roads, unpaved roads), the path-less-trodden was often ran along right next to the path-well-paved. We wanted it to be easy enough, to not have the demands of a self-sufficient, wilderness trip, so that we could have a beer and swim in the sea and enjoy being out there. I suppose that was our attitude to start. We have the time, so let’s take the time and enjoy the time.
Without the awe-inspiring moments of summiting a huge climb and looking out at the sun setting over the horizon, it is easy to forget (when you’re out there) why you decided to come and why you’re not having as much fun as you thought you would be. More on this later on.
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C. RIDING:
Anyone with any level of fitness could have completed this trip. It was topographically flat and generally well paved and easy to navigate, with access to supplies very frequently. It was my first distance cycling trip and so I think subconsciously I leaned into these comforts prior to setting off. Somehow I was still surprised during the trip just how a-part-of the world we still were. Usually when we go out for a trip it’s to get away from life as we know it, to be in nature, to change pace and to strip much of regular-life away for some time. This did not feel like that at all. We did not increase any forms of physical conditioning prior to the trip. No ‘training’ was taking place, and so we thought we’d try and ease into the consecutive days of riding and hope that the first half of the ride would be a conditioning process for the latter half.
Really, the entire two weeks was a conditioning process. There is a feeling of adaptation to be noticed and felt when spending a lot of time doing anything physical. The body wanted to fight and resist the riding, the rotating of the joints, the weight distribution, the pushing and pulling, the friction of repetitive action and the general aches and pains that come with drinking them beers, smoking them cigarets and sleeping on a shotgun thermarest (more of that in the Day Reports). This kind of compiles for the first week. It’s hard to map it out. Sometimes everything takes turns hurting for hours on end and sometimes you get an hour of seamless ease, but the general gist of adaptation and conditioning is that they lead in a linear sense toward a reduction of discomfort. As readers of The Main Stem know, a reduction of discomfort generally results in an increase in one’s ability to be present and a general sense of enjoyment. It seems like only in the reduction of discomforts can one find reward in a sense of ease.
Breaking down the overall task into smaller, more manageable chunks helps the mind to fight less against the demands being placed on the body. A six country trip gets broken into fourteen individual days. A one-hundred kilometre day gets broken in half, to accomodate lunch and to finish the day in a certain destination. A half day gets broken into small ten kilometre sections, between which a snack, a rest, a coffee may be looked-forward-to. As the body begins to condition to the demands placed upon it and some progress is made on the overall goal, the mind is able to start to conceptualise this goal-breakdown system. So both mind and body condition and adapt. The longer the trip, the longer the experience of adaptation that can be witnessed. Generally this experience is positive. The reduction in discomfort and the freeing up of the mind leads to a more actively enjoyable experience. As adaptation and conditioning are happening simultaneously it’s hard to pinpoint which of them is responsible for the gradual ease of enjoying oneself. At this stage of reflection, I am not sure if the aches and pains reduced substantially after the first week, or if we just adapted to their being there and so their novelty wore off.
The Coast VS Inland:
The aim of the game was to follow the North Sea, up to Denmark. As we know, people like to live by the coast and people like to visit the coast when it’s warm. This was really prime-time for a lot of the towns that adorn the coast; lots of tourists, lots of business. This meant for us, plenty of places to eat, drink, buy supplies and so on, and as the coastal towns were busy they also could afford higher quality establishments; ie. better food, bikeshops, and a general lift in ‘contemporariness’. Really the coast was dreamy. Nicely paved riding, good views and the right kind of establishments to top up on life’s luxuries. If we were having a better time with the riding component (namely misfitting bicycles leading to more severe aches and pains, as well as a nicely shared bout of haemorrhoids) and we didn’t feel some* form of time constraint then we should have stuck to the coastal bike paths the entire way up to the Germany / Denmark border.
*some – Besides feeling a bit like shit the whole time, we were spending much more on the cash front than we expected to. Part of having luxuries around is that you cannot deny yourself their comforts. A wilderness trip would have involved less luxuries and probably less money; as we also payed nearly all nights for campsites (as there was no wild-land about).*
After the first week; our motivations had subtly shifted to finish sooner rather than later. We needed to put ourselves out of our misery, whilst completing our goal and salvaging the dwindling cash piles that we were churning out behind us. Note to all readers! Traditional ‘touring’ costs a lot of money!
This led to us cutting straight across some of the coastal humps that head Northeasterly from The Netherlands towards Germany. We didn’t calculate how much shaving off of time or distance we would be doing, we just made judgements based on how we were feeling and also with the hope to get some ‘change’ from being away from the densely populated coastal towns.
Sadly, inland was significantly worse than the coast. The open field of view remained, but looking out to a horizon on the North Sea turned into a sea of wheat, barley, and maze in all directions. (The only good thing that came out of being inland was the learning and singing of The Wicker Man soundtrack). The cycling infrastructure worsened and the frequency of resupply points became scarcer. We found ourselves a few times waterless and checking how much further ahead until a village or town. The riding became long and exaggerated and monotonous. There was very little stimulation. When we did arrive in towns, they were often smaller and felt none of the summer tourist boom of the coastal towns. This led to very little local economy. Few places to eat and resupply and naturally the quality of the available shops and eateries reduced simultaneously. There were some good places, some lovely towns and still a lot of good times with my compatriot, but it was a pretty stark contrast to the riding we had been almost-enjoying along the coast. We were hoping it was just the northern sections of the Netherlands that were going to be like this, but it seemed to be tainting the second half of the trip so we made a priority to get as much coastal riding in before getting to Denmark.
In summary some large portions of the trip were repetitive and monotonous and without Connor O’Patterson and
Patrick O’Connorson, our Irish alter egos, the soundtrack to The Wicker Man, and many podcasts about the abortion rulings in the US, we’d have been screwed, with too much time to wallow in our misery. Now, at time of writing, we are indebted to those things for bringing some stimulation to the longer, more boring sections of the trip.
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D. REFLECTIONS: At some point in this latter part of the trip; whilst trying to make sense of the highly uninspiring landscape and the arising boredom… I found myself thinking a lot about what I was getting out of the trip. At that moment it felt like, besides the occasional laugh and some quality time with Jake, nothing but bankruptcy and blood when I wiped. I proclaimed in the second week that it was a better idea to do shorter trips, in more remarkable places, then longer trips across familiar territory. Jake agreed and I think both of us were finding it harder to make meaning from being there then we expected. There were few peaks and troughs when it came to the difficulty of the riding. There weren't any moments of awe, and few moments of overcoming adverse circumstances. In reality, a cold beer at the end of the day was as good as it got on the trip.
Many factors played a part in this, besides the route as outlined above, I think primarily it was that the trip sat in a durational limbo. It wasn’t ‘life on the road’ where you learn to live a new way and forget to live with the luxuries of life. Had we toured a month, two, six, twelve; then surely this would have come into a full conceptualisation. Give more time to that process of adaptation and conceptualisation and maybe the more we would have got out of it. Life on the road is great; but for us it was marked by a smear of spending money we didn’t feel confident to spend. The trip felt like a lot of effort, for seemingly little reward at the time.
Breaking it down now, and learning from it and having it as some memories in the past is maybe the rewarding thing; but that doesn’t change the lack of fun felt at the time. I think within the constraints we faced - and others surely will too - namely time and money, it is likely to be a more gratifying and significant experience in one’s life to complete a trip that is harder, shorter and somewhere more beautiful, more wild and more disconnected to regular-living.
Carving time into life for trips like these, especially if you feel inclined to scale the trips up and up (in how challenging they are and in their duration) can be a selfish thing and requires the sacrifice of other holidays and other ways to spend your time and money. I think one of the major takeaways at time of riding is the greater the challenge, the greater the reward. Two weeks on the bike, six countries and not a crazy amount to take away from it. Having something to blog about is the
greatest takeaway, because giving this trip the time required for writing and reflecting, is giving myself the opportunity to learn from the experience. I suppose it is a testament to the fact that in our life in general, some things require time and retrospect in order to become rewarding, and meaningful. That is definitely not a takeaway I would have gained from a different trip, one that was filled with adventure, with massive highs and lows. It was a trip that left us with nothing besides some satisfaction that we had not failed (again), but also a trip that required writing about in order to feel good about.
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This is a multi-post coverage of our England to Denmark Trip on bicycles. The posts include:
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