June 8: Day 38, Øster Hurup-Frederikshavn
The place I'm staying doesn't provide breakfast. But this is fine: there's a supermarket just across the road, and I picked up a bag of cereal in Flensburg, expecting that sooner or later it'd be better to arrange my own breakfast. Today is the day.
The supermarket has a section for pastries; and I have to be restrained and only get one. (Well, two.) The fruit is a bit meh; the only thing that looks good is a banana. I also need milk and maybe yoghurt: there's a lot of milk options, so many I wish I'd got a photo. I end up getting one of the milk cartons they have the most of, which is safe and boring and probably not reindeer milk.
There is a drip coffee machine at the hostel, and it grinds beans on demand. I checked it had beans and things before leaving, but when I try to use it, it sounds like it’s grinding bolts not beans. Not good … I check the filter and there’s a tiny amount of ground coffee, and a scattering of half-bean chunks. I try a few things, but can't get it to deliver a decent amount of grounds, and there’s no ground coffee around so I leave it to drip and hope for the best. The resulting cup looks like slightly dirty water, and the coffee taste is so faint it might as well be weak tea. Guess that didn't work out!
The rest of breakfast is just fine though; the pastries are great and the milk tastes like milk.
Today is a short 4.5h ride to Frederikshavn. Unfortunately I'm not feeling 100% for some reason, so I figure I should probably use the spare time to rest. It's probably a low-grade cold, but I can't rule out coffee deprivation.
From left to right: bottle return at the supermarket; the Danes must drink a lot. Queue for the ferry. Me on the ferry, I had to wait for the cars so there’s time for selfies. And a picture of the bike.
It's a great day for cycling. The weather forecast claims it'll be an easterly at the start and a westerly at the end, which doesn't rule out a headwind but does give me hope.
The route is almost exclusively on a road, sometimes with and sometimes without a cycle path. About an hour in is a ferry crossing. I queue with the cars, because you buy tickets at a machine. The car in front of me has problems getting a ticket; they have to wait until the ferry arrives and an attendant comes over. He tells me I need to get a bike ticket from another machine further down so I got out of the queue and zoomed off. The weird part is that he was definitely speaking mumbled Danish but I remember it being crystal clear. I guess there's some universal language for surly attendants?
On the other side of the ferry ride I stopped for lunch at a place called Miss Dot's, which served a very nice sandwich which I ate even though I didn't have any appetite.
The rest of the ride was three hours on roads. It was a scenic route and there wasn't much traffic but I miss the German cyclepaths.
From left to right: the road looks nice, but there were regular trucks which aren’t so nice. Scenic village. First view of Frederikshavn. Looks like the offshore wind industry is here alongside the oil industry! Main street at sunset.
My first view of Frederikshavn was an oilrig and two mammoth old ships in the harbour. They had wind turbines behind them, but I can only guess that the oil industry has a big presence here! In the hotel and the cafe I went to later they have pictures of Frederikshavn industry, images of cranes and heavy equipment looking nonchalant. Reminds me a bit of Aberdeen, which had adverts for multimillion pound oil drilling equipment at the airport.
I'm staying at the Herman Bang B&B, but all the doors are locked: turns out I needed to check in at Herman Bang Best Western Hotel which is three blocks away. Apparently the email with this info doesn't get through if you book through Booking.com, which I did. (I talked about this with the person at checkin, they didn’t really seem motivated to get it fixed.) I'm definitely in the downmarket building, the Best Western side is much nicer!
I got in at a respectable 1630, decided I should spend the spare time resting. Tomorrow is going to be another quiet day, but from Sunday it'll be back to normal, so I'd like to be back to normal by then too.
What I’m listening to: Freshly Squeezed / Angelo Badalamenti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kHOR3BoOWo
From the Twin Peaks soundtrack. That thing has class.
