112km uphill, with rain, wind and a flat tire. Definitely our longest stint on the bicycle so far this trip.

We were resolved to leave earlier in the morning since we wimped out the day before. And we did, just not quite as early as planned. When we woke up it was raining out so Bethany got right back in to bed and I slowed down substantially. But we still got off at a reasonable time; considering that we didn’t have to pull down a tent and somebody else made our breakfast for us, it would have been criminal if we didn’t get a relatively early start.

The entire journey was accompanied by a south wind. It appears that the prevailing winds in Denmark are southern. I hope that’s not true for for all of Europe, for we have a lot of miles south to go! The wind was not as strong as it has been, but it was strong enough to keep our speed on the flats to under 20 km/h. The rain did manage to stay away for most of our trip, but we did experience a little at the beginning and the end. The hills weren’t as bad as we expected, but we did go from sea level up to about 100 metres in altitude. That’s not very high, but altitude has a way of insisting that you go up and down a lot for each little bit up!

The flat tire? I didn’t deal with it today; I just pushed the bike the last 500 metres and I’ll worry about it in the morning! My drive wheel went flat slowly, I didn’t notice it for a while. Bethany was wondering why I was going so slow.

Once we left the island of Mors, the route followed a very nice abandoned railway track for about 20 kilometres into Skive. For good reason we are worried about sections of the track marked “gravel”, but sometimes they are very nice.

About 60 km into our trip today we pulled out the maps to decide where to stay for th evening. Unfortunately, the closest open camp ground was over 60 km away! We had to hope for co-operative terrain and weather to make it in time. We mostly got it, but it was pretty dark when we pulled in at about 8. Our watches said that we’d been travelling for 10.5 hours, our computers said 113km for 8 hours.