Day #: 148 – 155

Date(s): 21SEP -28SEP2025

Location(s) Visited: Rubjerg Knude, Thy National Park, Østerild, Agger, Thyborøn, Bovbjerg Lighthouse, Lyngvig Lighthouse, Ribe & Rømø Island Denmark + Aventoft, Lingen & Rheine Germany + Montmédy, France

Overall Impression of Location(s): Rubjerg Knude = 3, Thy National Park = 3, Østerild = 4, Agger = 2, Thyborøn = 3, Bovbjerg Lighthouse = 3, Lyngvig Lighthouse = 2, Ribe = 3,  Rømø Island = 4, Aventoft = 3, Lingen = 2,  Rheine = 2, Montmédy = 3

4 -added to our favorite list and we would return again
3 – a great place to visit
2 – OK for one visit, but we would not return again
1 – we wish we hadn’t wasted our time here  

Distance Driven on Leg/Trip (km): 1430 (!) Tony says, we have been driving our asses off the last few days.

Weather/Temperature (°F): Fall has 100% arrived in Denmark and Germany. Temperatures continue to cool during the day and overnight with daytime highs in the mid 60’s and overnight into the mid-low 40’s. We have had much more rain over the last week, including several days we were completely rained out. Foggy and misty mornings are the norm with the grass and our van being completely covered in dew. In Denmark, weirdly none of the trees have started to change color yet, but as we continued south to Germany their trees were already beautiful shades of yellow, orange and red. This type of weather is our favorite and reminds us of our childhood growing up in Ohio USA.

Road Conditions: More of the same lovely Danish roads which merged seamlessly into the wide, beautiful roads of Germany. The only difference would be that in Germany there is a lot of Autobahns with no speed limits which doesn’t exist in Denmark. We cruised along in Denmark at the maximum speed limit mostly, but in Germany we can’t keep up on the Autobahn. Our fastest cruising speed on the Autobahn is about 130 kph which is still much too slow for the left lane as powerful cars whiz by us like we were standing still while semis/lorries plod slowly along in the right lane at 90 kph. There has also been A LOT of “not moving an inch” traffic delays in Germany especially near both Hamburg and Düsseldorf which seriously increased our transit times.

Chickpea Mechanical Status: The Hymer warranty work was completed on 26SEP2026 although the dealership was not our favorite. We arrived early at 9:30 AM for a 10:00 AM appointment (as in Germany if you aren’t early you are late, right?) only for the staff to initially have no idea why we were there at all. Tony showed them all the email exchanges and that somehow jogged their memory, but the visit was not off to a good start. We were told the mechanic would not be in until 11 AM. Um, so why do we have a 10 AM appointment scheduled? Well, the mechanic did not even look at our van until 11:30 AM and there were no updates or communication during this entire process. This very minor warranty work would have taken us (as two non-professionals) less than an hour to complete ourselves in totality but we sat in the waiting room with the hours passing by. Finally, the van was ready 3 and ½ hours after the mechanic arrived and the reception person simply handed us the keys and didn’t even review the repairs with us as they have done with the other service customers. We did a quick inspection and everything seemed OK so we departed as we were SOOO hungry (honestly more hangry than hungry) having missed lunch by many hours as we were in an industrial park with no food options available and had not planned on being there all day (9:30 AM – 3:30 PM). Overall, we aren’t super jazzed about these repairs as the new rubber bumper “nubs” they replaced fell off the first time we used the stove top and the stove hinges they replaced almost appear to be the same hinges but just with the rust sanded off (?). How could this teeny amount of work take so many hours to complete? Tracey has since bought some special glue and glued the “nubs” in place and she is going to bring back some Rustoleum and treat the hinges next year. Overall, boo on this Hymer dealership and their warranty repair work and process. The facility itself was large and new, they had a lot of staff, but there were almost no customers for service or sales. #redflag

Highlights:

• We boondocked with 20+ other motorhomes in the lot near Rubjerg Knude, one of Denmark’s most scenic lighthouses. After a restful sleep, we hiked early to this lighthouse which was located in the sand dunes and even took all the stairs to the top for a vista view. This 720-ton lighthouse was moved 70 meters inland in 2019 as it was getting too near the cliffs edge. We had the dunes and the lighthouse all to ourselves again, which has been a continued theme for our time in Denmark.
• We spent quite a bit of time at the National Test Center for Large Wind Turbines (https://www.testcenter.dk/) in Østerild. There was a small educational center but we spent most of our time riding our Bromptons out to each of the 9 test windmills on the property. This is the test center for the larger offshore windmills and they are tested in this area as it is VERY windy and mimics the conditions offshore. We were able to get close to the turbines and we could hear the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of the turbines over our heads which also cast a cool strobing effect shadow pattern on us. We are wind turbine enthusiasts and nerds, so we both enjoyed seeing these amazing machines up close and seeing the world’s largest crane which is used to assemble these massive structures.
• In Denmark, we have seen so many older adults walking with their hands clasped behind their backs. This is not something we have seen anywhere else to this extent and decided to try it for ourselves. It has been wonderful! Tracey’s back and posture has improved after just a few days of doing this and Tony feels it is helping to gain some flexibility back in his fractured shoulder. We have since learned it is a popular posture exercise to straighten the spine and reduce hunchback or buffalo hump. It feels weird at first, but after a while it feels great!
• We took another short ferry between Thyborøn and Agger which saved us 90 km of driving and provided added time to explore Thyborøn and the Jutland Memorial Park (https://www.jutland1916.com/jutland-in-memory/) which opened in 2016. We knew nothing of the WWI Battle of Jutland which occurred in this area between British and German naval forces in 1916. It was the largest naval battle and only full-scale clash of battleships of the war which resulted in the British forces preventing the German fleet from access to the Atlantic Ocean. The Memorial was wonderful as it was built on neutral Denmark land and remembered all sailors, regardless of which “side” they were on. There were twenty-five 3.5-meter-high stone obelisks representing the 25 ships which were sunk during this battle plus a twenty-sixth obelisk to commemorate the other 600+ sailors who died during this battle but whose ship was not sunk. In addition, there are individual 1.2-meter stones to represent the 8,645 men killed in this battle. There are only several hundred individual stones in place currently, but the plan is to add additional individual stones so that there is one for each sailor killed for a total of 8,645. We have been to a lot of war memorials, but this one was particularly moving to us. The design was powerful, but also the setting on the shores of Thyborøn with the North Sea waves crashing ashore only a few feet away. There were also large flocks of starlings doing their acrobatic flight maneuvers over the memorial and Tracey said she felt this was the souls of the sailors commemorated in this memorial. Overall, it was quite a powerful memorial and highly recommended.
• We continued heading down the west coast of Denmark in what felt like the Danish version of the Wild Atlantic Way which we had driven several months earlier in Ireland. Beaches, craggy and chalky cliffs, and peat bogs in a rural area without many residents. We are also seeing people with large buckets filled with wild mushrooms and once we realized what they were doing we saw lots of mushroom foragers while out on our walks. We stopped at some more lighthouses with Bovbjerg lighthouse being one of our favorites. We made an impromptu stop at a sand sculpture park (https://sandskulptur.dk/en/forside/) with 33 international artists all sculpting sand with the central theme being Greenland (Grønlands) throughout history. As with everything in Denmark, admission was expensive but we found it interesting and worth the money and the artists were seriously talented.
• We continued south driving longer distances than we typically do due to our Hymer appointment in a few days. We did stop at the massive Blåvand beach for a beach walk and to check out the WWII bunkers that have been turned into horse sculptures. There is much debate in Denmark about whether to keep all these WWII bunkers (there are 700+) or demolish them. For now, the ones which have become a safety issue have been demolished but the others remain, often serving as a graffiti spot for street artists. This beach is also the most western point of Denmark. The beach itself is incredibly wide and the sand is very firm making walking on it quite easy.
• We the Tirpitz museum which was mostly about the German occupation of Denmark during WWII and included access to a massive bunker built for ginormous Tirpitz cannons usually installed on battleships. While driving we came across NATO Special Forces doing training exercises in full camouflage ghillie suits and carrying exceptionally large weapons. This was all being done in a public area adjacent to the base which we thought was strange. We did an evening bike ride on a dike near Ribe in the hopes of seeing the large flocks of starlings this area is known for, but this didn’t happen but we did get on a lovely ride on a completely empty bike path.
• We had a jammed packed day for our last day in Denmark. It started with a city walk around the quaint town of Ribe with a stop at their weekly market, a wander through the Cathedral and a visit to the Kannikegården museum which is Denmark’s oldest brick building and oldest Christian cemetery. We then drove to the island of Rømø and drove our van onto the beach itself! This is a rite of passage for owning a motorhome in this part of the world and there were hundreds of other vehicles, many much larger than ours, driving all over the sand. We parked up as close to the water as we were comfortable (we were weenies about this looking back now) and prepared and ate a big lunch followed by a beach stroll. Our last stop was just over the Denmark/Germany border in another area where the starlings are supposed to gather each evening. This location looked more promising as at sunset there were 50+ other people standing on the dike and gazing out into the marsh in the distance. We did see very large groups of starlings, but from a distance and not in the numbers we had read about. There were 250,000 starlings in this area and at night they come back to this marsh to roost. The flocks are so large that they literally block out the sun and therefore this phenomenon is called Sort Sol or Black Sun (https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240111-denmarks-mysterious-natural-phenomenon). There was no Black Sun in our case, but it still was interesting to see.
• …And just like that our time in Denmark is sadly over. We have spent over 3 weeks in Denmark and we could have easily spent another 2 weeks exploring this beautiful country. So much water, coastline, beaches, dunes, lighthouses, islands, bridges, ferries, amazing cities like Copenhagen and Aarhus and amazing bicycle infrastructure. We were concerned that the weather would not be conducive to travel in September, but we had beautiful late summer – early fall weather. The Danish people were kind and friendly to us. We felt safe everywhere we went and the country is very clean. This country is Tracey’s new favorite visited country and is Tony’s 2^nd favorite (he is still hanging on to Switzerland). Denmark has exceeded our wildest expectations and we plan to come back soon to explore the areas that we missed!

Lowlights:

• Our Hymer dealer experience would be the lowest of the lowlights for this leg of our trip. We keep reminding ourselves that it is just 1 dealer and most of the Hymer dealers have been great to us and we shouldn’t let 1 negative experience cloud our opinion. Onwards!
• This part of the journey had a lot of driving required to get us to all these places. Normally we move more slowly and stay in places for a few days, but not on this leg. We were driving several hours each day and hitting 3+ separate locations or activities each day. We are glad we got to see all these places, but this part of the trip was rushed. We had to push our pace in order to get to Northern Germany for the only available Hymer warranty appointment before our departure back to the USA.
• Our time in Thy National Park (https://eng.nationalparkthy.dk/) was punctuated with several rainy days so we did not get to do all the hikes and exploration we wanted to do. This was quite disappointing as the park looks awesome on paper, so we will just plan to come back again another time. ☹

Up Next: We are playing it by ear with our travel plans, but will explore a bit more of NE France before heading towards Frankfurt Germany where we store our van and have a flight home on 09OCT2025.

Onwards! Vorwärts immer, rückwärts nimmer! Allez on y va!