Vikings on Two Wheels: bicycling Through England

By Mark Gowan

Back from Asia, with a little money left over and lacking the sense to save it, we were on our way again, finding adventure on bicycles.  Living in a tent and cooking on a small camp stove, we biked through England for six weeks and met people that told us their stories, some happy and some sad. The hospitality of strangers amazed us.  They opened up their homes and themselves up to us. We were looking for an answers now and were hoping to find them on the small roads in England, but we found them instead through the people we met.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Gowan
• Release date: Sep 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201229634

Mark Gowan

Mark began his career as a touring musician, meeting his wife in Up With People.  He went on to play music professionally for numerous bands for twelve years and then renovated houses in St. Louis Missouri before getting his Master of Philosophy and teaching community college in Littleton Colorado for nine years.  Yet again, a change was needed and so Mark and Helle packed up and moved to New Hampshire to start a farm.  Mark and Helle have been married for thirty-one years and currently live in the Dallas area where Mark writes, builds furniture, and records music to help raise money for animal sanctuaries.

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Preface

After returning from our three-month Asian backpacking trip we sat in the kitchen talking to Helle’s parents about our future.  They were asking questions that we had no answers for.  While we were at the farm, I was helping Jorgen, Helle’s father, with the daily tasks of running the place.  One day while working I went into the workshop to scavenge a part for the manure spreader that had decided to break and saw our bicycles sitting, dust covered, in the corner.  They were some of the few items that we had saved from the pre-Asian purge.  Seeing them brought back memories.  I had done a two-week bicycle trip in Poland the year before with a friend of mine, and I still had the panniers which were crumpled up in a box beside the bikes.  We had a little money left from the Asian trip and a little time on our hands.  An idea was seeded.

Soon I found myself taking the bikes out and cleaning them up after work.  I would check them out mechanically and fix the things that I could.  They had sat for a while, but I was able to get them up and rolling. One day Helle eyed me wheeling around the farm on mine.

I forgot about those!  Helle said, coming out to see what I was up to.

I saw them the other day and started cleaning them up.  I’ve still got bags from the Poland trip.

What are you saying? she asked.

Nothing.

Helle smiled.

Well, I’ve always wanted to travel in Europe.  You know that. She added.

Helle and I had been talking about our future.  She wanted to continue school and get her bachelor’s degree and me, I just wanted a change from what I had been doing which was playing music full time.

Do you have a place in mind? I asked.

You know, there’s England. She suddenly said, nonchalantly.

England?!  Why England? I asked, a bit surprised.

Well, there’s good universities and they speak English.

We do too.  What a coincidence! I said with a sarcastic smile.

They have great beer too! I added, "Are you up for biking so

long?"

How long are we talking about? Helle asked skeptically,

I haven’t thought that far ahead. I said, grinning.

And so an idea for an adventure was born and that was all it took.  We had the bikes and most of the gear. We had a little money, and we lacked the sense to save it.  As far as we were concerned this was a great combination that added up to a nice, easy adventure.  And so we would soon be on our way again, finding out that adventure can take many forms.  We were off to England.

Chapter 1: The Vikings are Coming

Time in Denmark went by quick.  By Saturday night, after two farewell parties, we were again ready to get on the road, this time by bicycle.  We had plans to leave around 8am the next morning.  We had packed the bike with camping gear, clothes and a few other items that added up to two heavily weighted-down bikes. 

So...leaving again? Helle’s dad asked, smiling as he often did.  He didn’t even pretend to understand us or why we did the things we did.  He just accepted us as we were.

Yep.  You just can’t keep us down can you. I answered, smiling.

What time do you plan on getting off?

About 8am.

Jorgen just chuckled and took a sip of coffee.  He knew us.  About  11am the next day we rolled out of the farm after saying our goodbyes and headed west against the wind.  Weeks before we had showed up at the farm from a three-month backpacking excursion in Asia to the surprise of Helle’s parents and to ourselves.  We were not done with travel, but we were done travelling like that.  We didn’t have specialized bicycles made for touring, but we had panniers and a will to see more of the world.  And so after a few weeks of rest and working on the farm, we had our bicycles saddled with bags, a few provisions, and ourselves, and were on our way. 

Denmark is a beautiful little country and one of its charms is the ever-present winds that whisk smells from the North Sea and the Baltic Sea onto the miles and miles of beaches and inland to the many small towns and dunes that make up the country.  The wind was also a pain in the ass, especially on a bicycle loaded with touring gear.  Right off the bat we battled the wind until we reached the protection of the Tversted tree plantation, about fourteen kilometers southwest.  Denmark not only offered beautiful and flat scenery, but it was also spiderwebbed with bicycle paths all throughout the country.  This made getting around easy.  We didn’t have to fight car-traffic.

We were still getting our legs but were enjoying the scenery so much that the slight and sneaking soreness was forgotten most of the time.  The wind, however, blew around and over us and into the tops of the trees, and into our eyes.  It was a ubiquitous part of the scenery.  We didn’t have time to stop and complain about the wind though.  We were on our way to Esbjerg to catch an overnight ferry to England and so were on a schedule.  Furthermore, we had our pride and couldn’t just let the wind get the best of us.  We pedaled on the whole day, however slowly, stopping at a grocery store to stock up for dinner that night. The grocery stores in Denmark were interesting and boring all at the same time. Nice and tidy and the same everywhere throughout the country.  We were carrying our own stove, a large, heavy Primus that we had sent back from Asia.  It burned almost anything flammable.  Because we had the stove, we always ended up buying things that were easy and fairly quick to cook.  But because we were on bicycles, we always took heed of the weight and the space and tried not to carry too many extras, including food that we did not need.  Typically we would carry some candy bars for snacks and that was about it.  We hurriedly made our choices, paid, and were on our way again.

Back in the wind, we started down the path that we thought was the right one.  We were wrong.  On bicycle journeys wrong turns are inevitable, but only if you have a specific place you needed to be, which we did.  Esbjerg, which was about 322 km south, was our goal and we knew the ferry wasn’t going to wait for us.  We took off after buying groceries and didn’t notice the wrong turn until we ended up back the grocery store that we had stopped at some time earlier. 

Is this the...

I think it is. Helle answered.

A few cuss words later and after double-checking the map, we were in the wind again, pedaling away and enjoying the beautiful Danish scenery. 

The nature of northern Denmark consisted primarily of dunes covered in a greenish, willowy grass called Marram grass.  This was always spotted in sections in between close-knit tree plantations.  But the more south we travelled, the nature became a bit more forested and populated.  Pine plantations took over the Marram grass and the dunes.  The Marram grass and the infamous west coast winds of Denmark made for an unmistakable sound, a sound that seldom went away.  It was peaceful and somewhat disturbing at times.  A continuous whooshing sound mixed with the creaking and cracking of the trees and grass being blown around.  The land was flat but biking against the wind small hills became mountain passes.  While we battled the wind along the bike path the mighty North Sea was just over the horizon with white caps on the rolling waves that hit the white beaches of the west coast.  They sounded like the roar of a highway.  We could just see the sea over the slight hill to our right.

Early on we took a short rest at a grassy picnic area alongside the asphalted bike path and straight away Helle fell asleep.  I lay there eating cherry jam and French bread and thinking about the Asian trip we had just come from.  And here again, we were on the road, albeit a very different road.  This one was paved, clean, and well kept.  I lay there and enjoyed the ever-present sound of the sea in the background.  This was truly another universe from the one we had come from just weeks earlier.  I still had the taste of curry in my mouth and could faintly hear the incessant hawkers in the background of my memory, but they were slowly being drowned out by the sounds of wind and sea and the natural silence.  I took a bit of bread and jam and thought about how different food tasted when travelling.  A big meal at home was many times simply scarfed down without thought.  On the road a simple snack such as bread and jam became a magnificent culinary experience.  I savored the sweet taste of the jam and the yeasty taste of the rye bread.  All of this ran through my head as Helle suddenly woke up with a start. 

Uhh...oh...I guess I fell asleep she exclaimed, bleary-eyed after her short nap.

You were snoring too! I answered, smiling.  Helle smirked.

I finished up my snack and after rousing ourselves we hit the road again biking straight through Hjorring towards Brondeslev.  The riding was slow with the weight of the loaded bicycles, not to mention our lack of physical prowess. The wind would continue to be irritating, but for no good reason other than on a bicycle wind was just irritating.

NOW FOR THOSE WHO HAVE never had the experience of touring by bicycle it could be different for all the obvious reasons, but also for a few that might not be recognizable right off the bat.  Things moved slower but at the same time there was often a sense of urgency.  It seemed that there was always some place to be.  Perhaps it was the nature of travel?  Oddly, it was the same while backpacking through Asia.  On a bicycle, though, we didn’t have the option of catching a bus or just flying to another country.  We found that a bicycle was an honest form of transportation, it went only as fast we could make it go.  Also, a bicycle hurriedly reminded us that it was impossible to bullshit our way up a hill or against the wind for that matter.  On a bicycle talk was cheap.  Pedaling was what mattered.  The bicycle even reminded us later on just how fast or slow we should have pedaled.  Especially early on.  It was necessary to plan our days because we only had so much energy to expend per day.  On more than one occasion during our trip we found ourselves totally spent half-way through the day.  With no choice we had to stop and rest for the rest of the day.  Not a bad thing, necessarily, just one of many lessons to be learned.

Travelling by bicycle was strangely comfortable and afforded a true feeling of freedom.  Looking down at the pedals and our legs as they made cycle after cycle around the crank and enjoying the ground underneath us as it passed by was mentally refreshing.  Every bump and crevice in the road were noticed and we soon felt every muscle in our body.  Bicycling was meditative most of the time, but like all activities there was a period of acclimating.  During this time there were aches and pains to contend with.  The first muscle to become a pain-in-the-ass was...well, the ass.  We learned tricks like squinching the butt muscle and then relaxing it as we rode and shifting positions on the seat and on the handlebars.  Of course, this was all assuming our bicycles were set up correctly.  We ended up stopping a few times the first few days to adjust our seats and handlebars.  At the end of the day though, there was no substitute for time in the saddle.

The next body part that we tended to notice were the knees.  At first the soreness was mild until we noticed that one leg was aching more than the other.  We would try giving that leg a break by concentrating on the other but found that that simply brought soreness in the leg we used and so would switch, and so on.  The morning after was when the knees really reminded us who was the boss.  Then there were the hands.  We found out the importance of having the right handlebars.  The more possible positions the better.  This was also why we stopped and tried to set up our bikes correctly.  We found that our aches and pains would go away, change, travel, leave, and come back.  After hours and days of biking it started to look like we were trying to do a complicated jazz dance routine on the bike as we wiggled around and tried pedaling with one leg or the other. 

We found that there were growing pains on our long-distance biking, especially during the first few days.  The first day was spent getting used to being on bicycles and that there was no real way to do this other than just being on bicycles.  We would start and stop, adjusting this and moving that.  We would rearrange our gear and get going again just to stop down the road and do it all again.  After that there was the battle of finding a reasonable pace.  We were starting to realize that trying to find a pace suited to both of us was almost impossible.  Stops were primarily dictated by food or energy.  We would always start off strong and then the wind would get the best of us, slowing us down to a crawl until the only thing we could do was to stop and rest.  We were not alone in our happy misery. 

In Denmark bicycle tourists were common sights throughout the country, especially in the summer, but it was not so common for them to knock on your door, but that’s what we did.  We decided that we would camp the entire tour and so seven hours after taking off we knocked on the door of a