Bornholm: a large Danish island in the middle of the Black Sea, reached by ferry from Sweden, Germany, or Poland. It’s relaxing, lush, pastoral… and some might even say a little boring.

I love it– there are smokehouse for fish (optionally served with an egg yolks), a few cute towns, breweries, ice cream, beaches and forests… and most notably for this blog: ~230km of interconnected cycle trails around and through the island.

I was here for a brief side trip from Copenhagen** many years ago, and knew I wanted to come back and bike. Eventually I convinced my partner to take a slow vacation where we rented a house and cooked, read, did jigsaw puzzles, hiked… and I fit in three days of cycling.

It’s easiest to show the variety of riding conditions with a gallery of images– mostly flat, paved or gravel, often off-road:

I’d purchased a set of maps (of course) and done some preplanning of potential loops online, but the on-the-ground signage was mostly good (except at some of the entrypoints to trails from the outer loop road) with wayfinding even at the intersection of multiple bike paths in the wooded interior of the island:

In my pre-trip planning I’d sketched out this set of loops, which I believe would have traced 95%+ of the official routes on the island:

In my 180km of riding here are the routes I actually covered, perhaps 70% of the official routes?

Beyond just the cycling, it was a peaceful and pleasant place to spend almost a week– large enough to not feel limiting, but small enough that anywhere was accessible.

I found this an especially relaxing and contemplative cycling vacation– what can I learn from this?

  • Having a single home base rental house for the week and riding different loops from it took a lot of the stress out of distance, timing, planning, and weather (there was never a push to get to the next stop despite adverse conditions).
  • Cycling on nearly-empty or car-free roads made it easier to focus on other observation and introspection.
  • Riding in nature surrounded by birdsong, the leaves rustling on trees, and so on also fed into that.
  • I really enjoy the texture and sound of riding on light gravel.
  • It was nice to be able to merge this with a vacation with my non-cycling partner, by having a house we cooked and spent time in every evening (and alternating between solo bike days and exploration days together)

Somewhere I took notes on each of the bike routes and which ones I found more pleasant… but I can’t find them currently. Perhaps some day I’ll add them here:

(???)

**I scheduled this mini-vacation for immediately after the Berlin->Copenhagen ride I was doing with a friend, since I’d already be in the region with my bike.