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August 25 Friday Bicycle touring Denmark It was raining slightly as we made ready to depart our free Danish camp site this morning. Arran and Rebecca packed up their cycling gear and left for the chalk cliffs of Mon, located at the end of the island. Sharon and I waited inside our dry tent until it stopped raining and then packed up our biking gear and set off, congratulating ourselves on our astute timing. It lasted until the corner and then the rain began. So much for perfect timing. Looking skyward, we saw there was no clearing in sight, so we stopped to don our rain coats. Off we cycled to see the Cliffs of Mon. I hoped it wasn't going to be like the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, one of our wettest day of bicycle touring ever. The route we were cycling was mainly through uninteresting yellow stubbly straw fields. When you've seen one stubbly field, you've seen them all. One good bit of cycling was along a dirt road through a forest. The cool road deposited us right at the entrance to the cliffs' parking lot. We hiked up stairs to a scenic overlook. My camera has obtained a rather twitchy shutter since Sharon's big fall with my bag, so I hope the shot turns out since I was still moving the camera about trying to get the best composition when the shutter released of its own accord. I guess it thought I was taking too long. At the lookout, someone had drilled a hole through the ground to keep people from going past the fence and standing on a ledge that was severely undercut. The hole was only about a foot thick. We could see the drop to the sea a thousand feet below. At first, I thought perhaps some over ambitious gopher had gotten a surprise. Back in the parking lot was a playground. I tried to get a picture of the cute blonde-haired children on the merry-go-round, but they got tired and ran off to the teeter-totter before I could get everything ready. Without taking a picture, I put the camera away with the shutter cocked. After a few bumps it took a picture of the lens cap. I pulled my touring bicycle to a stop to take a picture of a Danish house with a straw roof and wooden ribs on top with Sharon riding past. It was windy cycling on the way to the ferry. We had planned to meet Arran and Rebecca on the other side. But they were waiting for the ferry when we cycled up to the terminal. They had missed the other ferry by five minutes. It's a lucky thing that Sharon and I got there when we did-it's the last ferry of the day. Yikes. Wouldn't that have been wonderful? Arran and Rebecca on the other side waiting for us and us stuck on this side. Touring bikes and swimming don't go all that well together. We decided that in the future a better meeting place would be on the starting side of a ferry. The fare across cost the equivalent of six Danishes each. We almost -- almost -- cycled around to a bridge once we looked at it that way. Since arriving to bicycle tour in Denmark we figure the cost of everything in how many Danish pastry we could buy. We cycled a road that dead ended at the sea and a shooting range. We set our bicycle touring tents up on a gravel pad where the shooting range participants lay to shoot. Just after we got our Kelty tent set up, black clouds rolled in. Heavy thunder. Down pour. We could see a wall of water coming towards us. Flash flood. I'm not kidding. A great stream of water ran down a tiny gully from the parking lot and headed straight for our tent. With Arran and Rebecca's quick thinking and help we grabbed the corners of our tent and lifted it and everything inside to a drier spot on some grass beside the shooting pads. For our troubles, we all got muddy and soaked. Luckily there was a table under a small overhang and we all huddled under that while we made supper. |
