Home - Hvide Sande

Week 1 in record temperatures. Across the channel, through mainland Europe and into Denmark.

The first few days, perhaps week of this trip were spent in a slightly hazy mindframe, with doubts and “what have we dones” taking up more headspace than we’d like to admit. Normally the anticipation of setting off into the unknown is a blend of excitement tempered by a little hesitation or fear. On this occasion it somehow felt like the other way around. The only logic we can prescribe to this reversal is that we’re leaving normality behind, why then should our feelings follow regular patterns where nothing else does?

Our initial anxiety pretty quickly morphed from mental to physical on day 2 when we naively drove into the hottest weather we had ever experienced, at any place or time in our lives. The type of heat that needs a new word to be effectively described. Sweltering, stifling, scorching, none do justice to the hairdryer we lived inside for those first days. We dotted from river to lake in an attempt to keep cool and lived the experience twice - once in reality and a second time whilst we waited for sleep to come in the night.

We later learnt that Belgium and Holland both registered new record temperatures on the days we were there, a scary and unwanted fact that we had the misfortune to witness. We’ve read countless news reports and social media comments about the danger of global warming but it is only now, having experienced something unprecedented, that we have started to understand the reality for ourselves. It was a sobering experience, but one we will try to remember instead of trying to forget.

It is often said that the people you meet are more important than the places you visit along the road. At Grum & Gabbi’s homestead in North Germany we found out why. Here, surrounded by humans and dogs - some familiar, some new - we found shelter from the sun and kindness and warmth in the people. We stayed two nights and when we left we took with us 12 fresh eggs, 20ltr of fresh water and a mindful of fresh perspective.

We passed through Belgium, Holland and Germany in our first week and it wasn’t until we reached southern Denmark that the rhythm and slowdown pace of living in a van started to wash over us and into the mental void that our old lives had left behind. The heat finally gave way to a cool sea breeze and it was then, on day 7 that felt oddly like the real start to this trip. We’d left familiarity of home, and then heat behind and now something entirely new greeted us in.