Day 4. Nymindegab to Harboør.
Distance 113km. Average 19.2km/h.
We awoke to the realisation that the fine weather that Northern Europe had been enjoying for the last few weeks, had broken. Looking up at the sky and feeling the breeze we realised that the rain was not going to stop soon, and probably not all day. Now that we were prepared for the worst that the Danish coastal climate could throw at us, we went about our morning preparations with grin and bear it mentality.
Fortunately the campsite showers turned out to be good, lots of hot water and everything was clean. As I finished the heavens opened, which didn't matter too much as I still had to do the washing up. However after ten minutes that was done but the rain was still doing its best to wash away the sandy topsoil. I waited another ten minutes by which time the rain and wind had abated enough to make the dash back to the tent worthwhile.
Damae had finished rolling up the inner tent by the time I got back and was wondering where I had got to. With the bags packed we waited until the rain eased off again and pulling our raincoats on, crawled out into the drizzle to take down the rest of the tent. That done we loaded up the bikes and hit the toilet block for the last time. The wind was still strong and blustery and stayed like that for much of the day. But we had a route to follow so we hopped on our bikes and headed north once more.
This part of the route had lots of dune off-road sections. We did probably twenty kilometres of this and found them enjoyable if rather hard going. The first section of off-road was marked by Damae as 'Good' and this ran up along a thin spit of land after Bjerreård next to the Rinkøbing Fjord. I went though puddles gleefully, my feet kept dry by my waterproof socks.
I took no photos as it was still raining and the wind was strong albeit favourable. Cycling along a spit of land was actually quite nice but the route sign posting left something to be desired at times. This might seem a little strange as it was such a narrow piece of land. However there are a surprising number of small access roads in the area just to confuse the already rain befuddled cyclist.
I am not sure exactly where we stopped to do some shopping but it was probably in Hvide Sande given the timestamps on the photos. Damae did some groceries and I took a bored photo of a traditional Danish bike. I also took a video of the weather conditions, this frame and the video* give you the idea. Leaving Hvide Sande we then made a tactical decision to take the cycle paths next to the main road seeing as we had the wind in our backs. The prospect of going back into the dunes in the rain was also not terribly appealing. This turned out to be a good decision and contributed to our high average speed on this day. Also as we had seen some of the dunes we decided that the rest of it was not going to be so different as to warrant trying another section.
We'd decided that Ringkøbing although probably quite nice, was not interesting enough on a rainy summers day to be worth the twenty kilometre detour. Thus at Søndervig we turned right and then left up to Hovvig. We struggled a bit to find the way out of Søndervig and passed a Dutch couple with a similar problem. One of them had nice yellow Ortlieb bags, including a handlebar bag. We were to play a game of leap frog with them for the next few days.
* There is a link to the video so you won't have to download it if you don't want to.