Safe Return Doubtful

A couple of small victories in the last few days. I was able to put on the right sock on Wednesday morning, and that was followed on Friday by the running shoe. Over the last five weeks, since my surgery, I have been walking in my Keen sandals, which are great, but lack any real grip, so unsuitable and a liability for anything off road. Denmark has evidently been wet in the last weeks as well, so the shoes were a real bonus, most trails are muddy.

Another noticeable benefit has been that I’m moving at a pace much quicker than I have done for two or three years. The first night in Denmark I stayed in the forest park around the lakes of the village of Jels. The trails around the forest are very flat, so afflicted by a fair amount of mud. Early Saturday morning Roja and I did five miles in about 90 minutes, so the rehab has been going well.

Later in the morning I went to the pool in Kolding, where I have been before. I was in the pool for half an hour, but I need to be patient with swimming, the leg isn’t strong enough yet, but time in the pool I can tell is beneficial. The sauna was very welcome also, and something I always look forward to, every week or so, when travelling in Scandinavia.

In the afternoon we drove a couple of hours further north, making sure to get into camp before the Premiership Rugby from Bristol. Then, Saturday evening is barely complete without a beer and a horror film, this time Late Night With The Devil, which I’ll review separately, but was entertaining, if a bit predictable. The park up was at Rebild, where I have been before, a couple of years ago when returning from the far north in November. This is a very rare hilly area of Denmark, sandstone hills with heather and rock, which are very scenic, especially at the moment, when their green colour is enhanced by all the rain. There’s a visitors’ centre, where I stayed last time, but this was a spring Saturday afternoon with good weather, so it was busy. I resorted to one of the hiking car parks a few hundred metres away. Pretty much all of the visitors left in the early evening as rain was due. It had attracted so many, as it was the first decent weather weekend of spring.

These Danish Dumplings of hills, the highest of which is a little over a hundred metres, are nicknamed the Danish Alps, at least by me. Roja and I took on the four highest of them on Sunday morning. We saw very few other people, a bit early for them, and the ones I did see didn’t seem very amused by me referring to them as the Danish Alps.

Preoccupied by my exploits at the pool yesterday, I went to the one in Aalborg at lunchtime. I was able to do more, though still not yet able to swim for any distance more than a few metres.

After lunch we drove up to the far north of the country, in readiness for the ferry to Norway tomorrow. There’s a coastal forest park at Tornby, a few kilometres south of Hirtshals, where the ferry goes from. The overnight rain had cleared and the day was fine, up to 16C, with plenty of sun, but the evening clouded over again, and the wind got up. I timed my arrival well, to catch the rugby from Gloucester, then take a hike down to the North Sea coast. I arrived into Hirtshals from Norway when travelling by bike in 2018, and then cycled down a very windy North Sea Cycle Route along the west coast, mainly, into the wind.. That journal is now in the archive.

Later in the evening we walked the couple of kilometres through the forest down to Tornby Beach, much to Roja’s delight, the first beach he has been at since Mani in Greece in January.

The first beach of very many on this course.

Back up at the car park were another couple of overnight vehicles, both heading to Norway on the Fjord Line ferry tomorrow morning. I didn’t talk to the French in their self build Citroen as they were out walking, but in a car with a roof tent was a young Ukrainian couple and we chatted for a while. They had lived in Czech Republic since 2018 working every possible hour of overtime for UPS to enable them to get away in their vehicle. It was crammed full of equipment and food. They were headed to Lofoten for two weeks only, a huge distance. I was able to pass on the trick for the free way to get there, as otherwise the ferry from Bodo is about 100 euros. They had been in the Balkans on their last tour, so we had plenty to chat about. They said they were trying to get in as much travel as possible before they had children. I’m not sure I’ve met many people travelling at that stage of life.

Later in the evening I met the French couple in their self converted Citroen. They were in their 30s and on a break from work for two months to travel up to North Cape, and return through Sweden. They both worked for a local radio station in Marseilles, as researchers, but had come to the end of a contract. The woman was to start as a science presenter on a national channel from the start of July. We chatted into the evening, and dinner was late by the time I returned to the van.