Monday, June 23rd, 2025
Kristiansand, Norway to Bad Fallingbostel, Germany
(via Denmark)
Distance travelled 625 kilometres

When I have to get up very early, my brain invokes all sorts of safety procedures to ensure I do not oversleep.
It is of no matter that I tell myself (and hence, presumably, my brain), at least fifty times that I have set my iPhone alarm for ten minutes before, five minutes before and the actual time that I want to wake up – and that I have checked, several times, that the little green dots beside those times are present, it still makes me get up an hour before any of that happens. So it was that I was padding around our room in the darkness at 03;30, just in case …

In the darkness ? I hear you enquire, surely you were in the land of the midnight sun ? The answers to those questions would have to be “yes” and “apparently not any longer”

My much more nocturnal spouse, who is a companion, it seems, to bats and badgers while I am asleep, informed me that every night had contained a short period of darkness. Furthermore, that period had lengthened steadily as we had moved southwards. I had not seen it personally, but then again why would I ?

Anyway, a glance out of the window revealed we were, in fact in the land of, if not the midnight rain, at least the three-thirty a.m. rain. It was raining heavily. As ever, Lucie was woken up by the sound of my breathing and try as I might, I could not follow her example and go back to sleep. So, at four-fifteen, I went down to the reception and collected our breakfasts in their little boxes and brought Lucie an espresso from the machine. It was still raining.

I read for a bit, Micheal Connelly by then – and let my alarm wake Lucie up to allow her to start her day. The first thing she did was to tell me it was raining. Because our ferry was at 06:30, the final check in was (allegedly) at 05:30, so that meant leaving the hotel at 05:15. Lucie did the packing thing, with a slight difference. To give us access to our breakfast box (she had amalgamated them) and our e-readers on board, she had magicked up the World’s tiniest rucksack.

We went down to check out, already day-glo’d up. The night receptionist told us that it was raining.

When we got outside, we very quickly decided that “raining” was not really an adequate adjective. I had to move the Harley across the road and onto the path under the hotel’s overhang, just so that we could load it without drowning. We moved off towards the port through a small lake.

We checked in on time – and that meant we had to spend ages waiting in line in the downpour before we could board. Our “Hirtshals” sticker was papier-maché, long before the port staff (who all seemed to be ten year old girls in rain gear) beckoned us onto the ferry. At least we got to go first !

There were three motorcycles, us, a Norwegian on an Africa Twin and a German guy on a BMW dual sport. We collectively worked out the mechanism of the straps to hold our bikes steady, secured them and retired upstairs.

We were on a Danish, Fjordline ferry and, this time, the cost was only EUR 112 – but it was a slightly shorter crossing. The ship was called the FSTR (I think that is meant to represent FaSTeR, to young people) and it both boarded and unloaded at the stern. I was nearly sent to Asgaard, instead of Hirtshals, by a Toyota RAV4 doing an unexpected and very rapid U-turn, as I crossed the car deck.

The crossing itself was swift and smooth, all that strapping down of the Harley had been for nothing. Lucie spent some of the time assembling our breakfasts that had, for some reason been given to us in component form. Luckily, give that girl some slices of bread, cheese and ham, some butter and a wooden knife and, before you can say “I wonder why the hotel did not do this”, you will be handed some sandwiches.

The ferry left on the dot, made a two and a half hour crossing and, by nine o’clock, we had solved the mystery of how to loosen the restraining straps and were heading out into Danish rain. We negotiated the exit to Hirtshals and set off south, down the E39, into the soggy Danish countryside.

What followed was over nine hours of riding. There were occasional stretches of sunshine and blue sky, but the vast majority of the trip was made in some form of precipitation. Usually this was just rain. Sometimes it faded to drizzle and on a couple of occasions it was so ferocious a deluge that a few drops penetrated my waterproof trousers from whence some trickled down into my boots. Otherwise, no water other got into our boots, hikers from Keen bought especially for this eventuality after the drowning all our feet got on the way to Slovenia. Likewise our rain jackets let in nary a drop. They were not cheap either, but we had got what we had paid for.

The journey was largely uneventful except for a few things.

Firstly (and very annoyingly), I managed to lose my H-D riding goggles. These are a fantastic piece of kit, the lenses are polarised, darken automatically in the sun and padding keeps your eyes insulated from reality. My first pair was trampled by a German toddler in a service station and its replacement must have fallen, unnoticed, from my saddle in a Danish one. Because it was so wet, I kept my visor down all of the time and did not notice their absence for over three hundred kilometres – so there was no point going back.

Secondly, there is a distinct lack of petrol stations alongside Danish highways and those that are there, are poorly and confusingly signposted. I swept straight past more than one because, although they appeared on the SatNav, they did not appear to be there until the turning was too close to take. I am such a slow learner that we eventually had to abandon the highway to fill the tank in a nearby town. We also saw one, (too late to use it of course) that was not even on the SatNav.
In fairness to the Danes, there is a huge amount of highway, widening and reconstruction going on and they may, eventually, put in better signposts. It is worth noting that, if you succeed in finding a service station, the sticky pastries on offer are far better than you might expect. Lucie, who experiments on everything, said it was the pastry itself that made all the difference and she will be trying some variations when we get home. Sadly, most places in Denmark (and not just on the motorway), seemed to think that an “espresso” meant half a litre of fairly strong coffee ….

Lastly, in one garage a German guy on a Harley Road King spoke to us about the deluge. His wife, riding a sporty little Honda, looked vaguely familiar. Eventually, it dawned on me that they were two of a group we had met in a petrol station, in Norway, the previous day. What a small world we do live in.

The day slowly unfolded as a long succession of soakings, drying outs and re-soakings as we wound our way out of Denmark again and into Germany. The service areas there were then better signposted, at least, but that was the key difference in the overall “enjoyability” factor.

There was an horrendous traffic jam on the approach to the bridge over the Kiel canal, but at least going over it at walking pace allowed us to take a proper look at it. There was also a really big accident, fortunately (for us) on the north bound carriageway that had caused a tail-back of seventeen kilometres that still seemed to be steadily growingˇwhen we finally passed the end.

We had chosen a slightly different route home in order to avoid the endless roadworks and traffic mayhem around Berlin on our final day. Sadly, in deluging rain, we found that we had merely exchanged those future traumas for the current endless roadworks and traffic mayhem around Hamburg. Being stuck for ages next to a lorry load of pigs, in a rainstorm. has made an entry into the list of “places I never want to be again” that I use to guide my actions.

We finally left both Hamburg and the rains behind. The last seventy kilometres were on fast, dry, highway in the late afternoon sunshine.

We left the highway and approached Bad Fallingbostel via quiet roads and green, tree-lined fields. We easily found our accommodation, the Hotel Schnehagen (Klinter Kirchweg 17) which had spacious grounds in a rural setting.

Our host was charming and multilingual and our room was cosy and warm (so I could dry my damp boots !)

There was an on-site restaurant where we both ate too much of the lovely food on offer. German beer is good too …….

I had been up since three a.m. and I had endured a long and tiring day before getting full-up – need I go on ?