Skagen: The Northern Most Tip of Denmark

Over the weekend, my friends and I hopped on a bus that took us to the tip of the world – or, at least, the very tip of Denmark.

Skagen is a small coastal town at the very north of Denmark. I had heard that it’s very pretty during the summer months and it’s worth the trip up north for the sights alone. If you stand on the beach in Grenen when the weather is right, sometimes you can clearly see the line where the Baltic and the North seas collide. The weather wasn’t quite right during my trip, but if you looked close enough at the waves, you could see that they cross each other in triangles.

The beach itself is beautiful, with a lot of brightly colored rocks and shells along the ocean. The dunes are perfect for having a picnic lunch and watching the waves or the cargo ships you can just make out in the distance. The day I was there was also a good day for walking barefoot along the beach and dipping your toes into the water. It was cold but it was refreshing. There wasn’t too many tourists there for a Saturday afternoon, so the whole time felt relaxing as my friends and I enjoyed the good weather and the ocean views.

After the beach, we hit the town! Unfortunately, most of the shops were closed on Saturdays, but we ended up window shopping the closed ones and peeking into the few shops that were open before heading back to the bus station. We stopped for a quick lunch at an American themed diner, which I found very amusing (not sure what the difference is between “American” steak and regular steak, but whatever). Pretty typical of Danish weather, it started raining before our bus arrived, so we camped out under an overhang while appreciating the fact that we remembered our raincoats.

The next stop on our journey was the Råbjerg Mile, the largest migrating dune in Europe. It’s a few kilometers south of Skagen, but it felt like we just stepped off the beach and into a desert. Or a beach without an ocean. There were huge sand dunes that you could walk across and climb up. If I hadn’t already wrecked my shoes with sand from the beaches, then I definitely wrecked them here. My shoes would just sink into the ground and there was nothing I could do about it. But the whole trip was a good way to see Denmark outside of the cities and see some pretty unforgettable sights.