After spending a large part of the summer travelling around Denmark, our opinion of the country ended up being much more complicated than the usual picture of Copenhagen, bicycles and tidy Scandinavian villages.
We saw Denmark slowly, in a motorhome, which means seeing a rather different country from someone moving between hotels and the main attractions. We crossed Jutland, followed much of the coast, reached the far north around Skagen, returned south through towns and small harbours, crossed onto Funen and spent time in places ranging from Aarhus and Aalborg to Mariager, Vejle, Fredericia, Middelfart, Nyborg, Odense and dozens of villages that would probably never appear in a normal first itinerary.
One of the things we liked most was how easy it was to find somewhere interesting without necessarily finding a major attraction. Denmark works particularly well like that. A small harbour, a beach, an old church or an ordinary coastal road could easily become the reason for stopping.
Some of our best places were extremely simple. At several stops there was little more than a parking area and a view, but if the position was good that was enough. The Danish coast is rarely dramatic in the Norwegian sense, but it is constantly accessible. Beaches, dunes, fjords, marinas and small harbours appear everywhere, and many of them are still used by local people rather than being turned completely into tourist attractions.
Mariager was one of the places that worked particularly well for us. We stayed at the campsite for two nights and had a large pitch overlooking the fjord. It was quiet, the facilities worked properly and the staff were very friendly. Just outside the campsite there was also a simpler motorhome area with spacious pitches and excellent views towards the water.
Other places were more mixed. Egå Marina, near Aarhus, had useful services and very good water pressure, but the service area was not particularly clean and the surroundings were noisier than we expected. Kerteminde Marina had a beautiful location but was busy, crowded and rather chaotic, with many of the motorhome spaces scattered among large car parks, cars and boats on trailers.
Vejle showed the two sides of travelling in Denmark particularly clearly. We found a pleasant forest parking area where we felt safe and had plenty of shade, even though the ground was extremely uneven. At the marina, however, the wastewater disposal platform was blocked by stored materials in the middle of the summer season. Vejle City Camping was spacious and close to the forest, but our night there cost 529 Danish kroner without electricity and the nearby road made it quite noisy.
Price was one of the more unpredictable parts of Denmark. Free parking still exists in many places, sometimes in very good locations, but campsites and official motorhome areas can become surprisingly expensive in summer. Paying more did not always mean getting a quieter or better place.
At Middelfart we found a free waterfront parking area that was peaceful and in a very good location, but it was tiny. By one o’clock it was already overcrowded, and manoeuvring a 23-foot motorhome among the other vehicles was difficult. That happened more than once in Denmark: an excellent free place can work perfectly if you arrive at the right moment and be almost useless an hour later.
Fredericia gave us one of the better examples of a simple daytime stop. We arrived at around ten in the morning and found space for our motorhome above the beach and promenade, with a very good view of the sea. It was peaceful, we felt safe and the town was immediately accessible. We were much less enthusiastic about Fredericia itself, but the waterfront was considerably better than the centre.
That became another lesson of this trip: Denmark is not uniformly beautiful. Some towns were much more interesting than others, and there were places where the reputation seemed stronger than what we actually saw.
Christiansfeld is probably the clearest example. At first we did not understand why it was UNESCO-listed. The church is extremely plain and the town is not spectacular in the usual sense. Only after learning about the Moravian community, the planned eighteenth-century streets and the social organisation behind the buildings did the place become genuinely interesting.
Other towns worked immediately. Aarhus had enough variety to justify more time, particularly around the open-air museum, botanical gardens and waterfront. Middelfart had the Little Belt and its bridges. Nyborg had the castle and the history of the Great Belt crossing. Odense turned out to be much more than Hans Christian Andersen once we began looking at its Viking and medieval history.
The infrastructure for a motorhome was generally good, but not perfect. We found excellent service points, clean public toilets and easy access in many places, but we also encountered blocked facilities, dirty disposal points, unclear parking arrangements and areas where the main problem was simply noise.
Noise was probably our most common complaint in Denmark. Roads are often close to otherwise attractive parking areas, and several places that looked good on a map were much less pleasant once we arrived. Motorways, busy local roads, marinas and town-centre traffic repeatedly made the difference between somewhere suitable for a short break and somewhere we would actually want to stay.
On the other hand, we rarely found access particularly difficult with our motorhome. Denmark is generally easy to drive through, distances are modest and the road system is simple. Crossing from one landscape to another does not take long. You can be beside the North Sea in the morning, inland among farmland later and at another coast before the end of the day.
We also gradually became much less interested in chasing famous places. Some of the most useful memories from Denmark are not the obvious ones: a quiet harbour, a strange prehistoric burial chamber near Martofte, a forest outside Vejle, the water at Fredericia, a small community-maintained motorhome area near Ejby or watching how quickly an ordinary Danish town changes once you learn what happened there.
Denmark was not perfect for motorhome travel, and we would not pretend that every stop was clean, cheap or peaceful. But it suited the way we travel very well. It allowed us to move slowly, change plans easily and find something worthwhile in places that initially looked completely ordinary.
By the end, the Denmark we remembered was not really a collection of attractions. It was the combination of bridges, beaches, ports, forests, small parking areas, expensive campsites, unexpectedly good free stops, Viking history, ordinary villages and a very large number of places beside the sea.