Marguerit-ruten

Biking in Denmark can be quite nice and easy because the country is rather flat. Not completely flat, but at most you can call it a rolling landscape. However, a nasty factor is the wind. It blows a lot and if it does, you can be lucky but too often Murphy's law will put the wind straight in your face. For long distance bikers that means a full day with maximum speeds of 15 km/h with an average of 10. In other words, it is fighting against the storm, the whole day long. Maybe I even prefer the mountains of Norway, because there, after a steep climb, at least you get the nice and easy rolling downhill.

windmill

facing the wind

taking the smaller roads

small roads

But all in all Denmark is, as many people have discovered, a very good place to bike. Not only because it's flat, but also because distances are rather small. We did the whole country north to south in one week, but if you have more time, there is plenty of opportunity to explore it in more detail. By taking the smaller roads the mileage per day drops of course, but you see more.

We did a bit of a mixture. Some places we really took the tiny roads and for other parts, we followed the bigger roads, which are more straight and also very important they are flatter. You have to accept the noise of the cars and trucks, but your progress is suddenly doubling.

marguerite traffic sign

along the route

following the route

A very nice feature for bikers in Denmark is a network of roads called the "Marguerit-ruten" (The Marguerite Route). Mostly normal roads, sometimes special biking paths, normally tarmac surface but here and there grid. The roads chosen are really the most pleasent ones we encountered. Through nature or agricultural areas, in all cases the selection was very well done.

The complete route can roughly be described as a circular one following the coast and border of Denmark, with a couple of intersections from east to west. The route can be cycled in any direction and is marked with small brown traffic signs that depict a white and yellow marguerite. These signs are only placed where a turn is needed, so sometimes, for many kilometers, there is no sign at all. You start to doubt if you lost your way, therefore better have a map to check. I'm sure there will be guides available that describe the route, but we just used a map that indicated the route, combined with the traffic signs along the road. That appeared to be more than sufficient.

farmers road

through farms

through nature

river

Characteristic of the route is that although it is a real long distance path covering the whole country, it is very much twisting and turning to optimize the use of the nicest roads. Consequence is that daily progress is not much when you stick to the route itself. However, if needed many shortcuts are possible. It is really not needed to do the whole route. Just by including parts of it in your own planned journey, you can make sure that you see some of the better parts of Denmark. But if you want to spend let's say a three week holiday biking through Denmark, it would really be nice just to follow the whole Marguerite Route from start to finish.

historic farm