There’s something about the Baltic Coast that made me impatient to visit. It’s not based in facts or intel – it’s more of a notion. The Baltic Coast feels like it would be fresh, pristine. The horizon would be endless. The rocks would be dark and the water would be clear. The breeze would be bracing. The people would be seafaring, weathered and tough. The alcohol would be neat. The coffee would be black.

I wasn’t disappointed on the geography front. The Baltic coast, from Kiel through to the German isle of Fehmarn, is a totally lovely place to stretch your bike legs. Kiel is a city just over an hour’s train ride from Hamburg. (You need to purchase an additional ticket, or fahrradtageskarte, for your bike on German trains. At time of writing this cost €6, and covers you for unlimited journeys made the same day). My route was approximately 100km, or 62 miles, though I can’t give you an accurate mileage as I kept getting lost.

This route took me via a diverse range of land- and seascapes, but there was a strange whiff of familiarity to most of them. Perhaps I’ve found my home away from home here.

The first stage of my journey loosely hugged the coast. It’s well signposted; follow the Ostseeradweg signs. The sand forms a thin ribbon between the path and the sea, and is immaculately white. The sea does indeed appear to go on forever, and it glows aquamarine where small sandy groves shine through. The smells of drying seaweed and fragrant dog roses make for an intoxicating assault on the senses, a disorienting mix of savoury and sweet, like salt caramel, and it brought to mind the exotic winds and bright water of the Black Isle, just out of Inverness. Cute shacks selling ice cream and waffles, chalkboards written in pastel colours and echoes of heavy marine industry across the sound – this time in the form of heavy freight boats – drew parallels more.

It was Ascension Day, a German public holiday, and the coast was teeming with people. What snapped me out of the illusion of being back among the familiar, was this new sight of so many groups of lads in bucket hats and Stone Island-style ‘av yer jackets (so far, so Manchester), but towing trailers laden with of tins of lager, a giant speaker among them spouting Euro-rap, hard house, Linkin Park, the Ghostbusters theme tune. I’ve never seen this trailer get-up before. Like the type of trailer you might see festival-goers towing their onesied toddlers in. It was new, and it was everywhere. It was a definite we’re-not-in-Kansas-any-more moment.

Past Laboe, a more built-up seaside village with beachfront yuppie high-rises and Aperol bars and cranes everywhere, the esplanade becomes wide and inviting; lined with dunes and more rose bushes, and with a (usually) generous tailwind that made the über-flat miles stupidly easy. I sailed past kite-flyers, kite surfers, families on bicycles, more bucket-hatted lager lads, sometimes on 6-seater bicycles. It felt so WHOLESOME.

The next phase took me away from the water’s edge and through arable farmland, giant horse chestnuts creating the only skyline drama amidst none more than gentle rises in the landscape, fields of some commodity crop or another growing uniformly just high enough the obscure the muscular bodies of hares big as fawns. Green fields these, but juxtaposed with blocks of radioactive yellow: dense rapeseed plantations emanating the type of dense, cloying pollen that you know can only lead to a wheezy night’s troubled sleeping. In some fields the yellow seeds must have escaped on the breeze and implanted themselves amongst crimson clover and sticky weed and the colour palette was so pleasing to the eye, made brighter against clouds ahead grown onerously dark, but if they did give out rain then I never quite caught up with it. Getting lost on quiet rural backroads amongst visually delicious cropland and immaculate brick farmhouses against an omnipresent backdrop of endless sea had overtures of cycling Scotland’s Fife coast.

After a detour by a military base hidden quietly in woodland reminiscent of the nuclear sub base near Helensburgh in Glasgow, the prevailing farmhouse style became less redbrick and more thickly thatched. Part three of the route was coloured by sunset, fatigue, and rain. Fleeting showers and the gentlest hailstorm I’ve ever encountered, competing with a sun in steady descent, a ticking reminder that all this dilly-dallying and getting lost had caught up with me – again – and a race to reach my destination before darkness. With my head down I persevered north through Oldenberg in Holstein, passing not just Holsteins but also Belted Galloway cattle (wasn’t expecting to see those neighbours here!) and over the bridge to Fehmarn, the sun dancing dazzlingly on the water as I crossed, wildfowl making last noiseful dashes for sustenance before dark. Mallards in their salubrious springtime courting colours. Herons, serene then suddenly flighty; hisses from the parents of tweenage fluffy goslings; inadvertently competing with swallows to swallow the flies that the air became thick with after each rain.

The low sun burned through the waterlogged air, aglow like a distant city on fire. It’s the type of weather I imagine they have all the time in Purgatory – neither-here-nor-there weather, the weather that rainbows are made of. One such phenomenon rose from the harbour ahead like a flare, the inspiration I needed to battle that last mile on tired legs and a windy isle. I thought of all the colours of today’s ride:

Red: the crimson clover
Orange: the smouldering sunset
Yellow: the brazen rapeseed
Green: the hare-hiding swards
Blue: the azure of the Baltic sea with the sand shining through
Indigo: those foreboding clouds
Violet: the Vimto energy gel that saw me through the last 10 miles.

And the spectrum of memories the Baltic coast invoked, places all new but strangely familiar.

Oh and the people? I was dead wrong about the people. They weren’t salty at all. They were soft as clarts. Soft shell coats in the sunshine, and when I went to a surf-themed music festival in the evening, they were all wrapped up in dry robes and beanie hats, with an extra layer of beer jacket. It wasn’t even that cold.

14 May, 2026