Danish speedbumps

MLu

Adventurer
2016-07-19 14.15.58 (Large).jpg

In hindsight, I should have walked it first, but my boots are a pain to lace up and my wife was already standing there with water not even halfway up to her knees. Transfer box to low, nice and steady into the water, and a decent acceleration once the front tires are in. The ground feels firm, but it's still a sandy beach, and being stuck in the middle of a stream right where it meets the North Sea didn't appeal to me so maybe I gave it a bit more welly than strictly necessary. A couple of meters in and we nosedive rather violently into the ocean, water splashing over the hood, front bumper smashing into the bottom of a stream on a beach about 1000 kilometers and two countries from home.


The western and northern (and, I expect, eastern) coasts of Denmark are largely empty but very fine sand beaches pretty much all the way. Hundreds and hundreds of kilometers. Way back in the day, the main road to Skagen (at the very top of Denmark, where the North Sea meets Kattegatt) used to go on the actual beach. Parts of the beach on the north-western coast is still an official road, with a 30 km/h speed limit and right of way for all pedestrians. Nowadays it's mainly a place where people go to sit on the beach, setting up their beach chairs and so on in the wind cover of their vehicle.

Me and my wife started from home, in Helsinki, Finland driving to Turku, taking the ferry overnight to Stockholm, from where we continued down through Sweden over the bridge to Copenhagen, Denmark and on toward Mandø on the west coast. From there the plan was to drive up the coast to Skagen, and take the ferry from Fredrikshavn over to Gothenburg in Sweden, and the ferry back to Turku from Stockholm. A 2500 km roadtrip.

Somewhere after Hirtshals, on the north coast, we drove out on road E 274, onto the beach. After some kilometers there were fewer and fewer cars moving around until we were alone. The reason was easy to see; there was a stream crossing the beach. Far away on the other side of the stream, we could see a lot of cars so clearly there was a way off the beach there. I like to think I saw some semblance of tire marks on the other side of the stream, so clearly somebody had driven there. Now... hindsight. That doesn't mean the vehicle had come from this side.


A few seconds of slightly panicked accelerator-mashing later we roar up on the other side of the stream, steam rising from the engine bay and and ungodly mechanical rattle coming from somewhere in the front. With a prayer to the gods of Land Rover and a quiet and quick promise to get a snorkel, I opened to hood to a cloud of steam. Everything is wet, but the engine runs and the vehicle moves. The rattle, thankfully, was nothing more than a piece of reinforcing metal from the lower parts of the bumper that had broken off when hitting the bottom and was jumping on and off the front right Mud Terrain. Great! No problem. The air filter box has water on it, but probably not in it, so I bend the metal piece back to sort of where the plastic pieces that it was supposed to support used to be and off we go.


Before the stream...
2016-07-19 14.28.32 (Large).jpg
2016-07-19 14.29.11 (Large).jpg

...and after
2016-07-19 14.37.43 (Large).jpg


Unfortunately, the reason for everyone being way over on the horizon, and not right on the other side of the stream is that there is another stream just a kilometer or so up the beach. We're effectively driving alone on a beach between two streams. We're not about to go back, though. On the most obvious place to cross stream number two, there's evidence that someone else has already tried it and failed, or at least made a huge wet and sandy mess of it. This time I listened to my wife, and drove right through the ocean surf instead of further up through the stream. Much smoother. I still didn't go out and walk it, so I guess that just proves that I'm the kind of person who does the same thing twice and expects different results.

[to be continued with all the rest of the trip, pics and stuff. Do excuse the rather sensationalist start of the story, but Denmark just sounds so boring but really is so very nice that it deserves more than just pics of sand dunes]
 

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