Today, we’re going to Denmark!

After a peaceful night’s sleep in a carpark in Holland, we hit the road around 10 a.m., feeling refreshed and ready for a new country.

We’ve decided to experiment with our navigation. Google Maps wanted to send us to Denmark via the busy city of Hamburg. No thanks! Keen to avoid the chaos, we zoomed in on the map and spotted a small ferry crossing the River Elbe. It looked like a much less stressful option, so we took a chance.

The Elbe is a mighty river, stretching over 1,000 kilometres all the way to the Czech Republic. As we crossed, we dodged three container ships making their way out of Hamburg. It was a little tense (not really), but we made it safely to the other side and carried on our way.

We stuck to our plan of avoiding motorways and eventually crossed the border into Denmark, arriving in the town of Tønder. It was quiet, eerily so. As we wandered the cobbled streets, I wondered if the whole town was taking an afternoon nap.

We found a large gravel parking lot to sleep in, but I wasn’t feeling The Vibe. That’s my personal radar for picking good overnight spots. It wasn’t a bad vibe, just not The Vibe. Hard to explain, but it’s a feeling I’ve learned to trust.

We were both pretty tired, so we cooked some dinner and mulled it over. I found another parking spot just eight minutes away, so we decided to go and check it out. And I’m so glad we did.

It turned out to be a dedicated free camping area for campervans, complete with a grassy patch and even toilets! Now this was The Vibe.

Later, we took a stroll through the town. It’s basically one long cobblestoned street lined with trees. But these are not your average trees. They had been carefully manicured into what looked like furry green fingers reaching for the sky. The cottages were straight out of a fairytale: old, quaint, with thatched-roofs and wonky bricks. It looked different from any street I’d seen in Europe, and that made me happy.

That, and the toilet. The toilet made me happy too.