What Does “3/4 Minus Cykeltur” Mean?

By Charles Mortensen

Imagine you’re out and about on your bike, sneaking off the tarmac onto an intriguing gravel road. Maybe you eventually link back up with more asphalt and then sneak off onto another gravel road, a bit narrower and darker. Maybe it’s raining a bit and you don’t have fenders, and maybe you wish you had worn some thermal gloves because it’s a bit chillier than you anticipated. You keep chugging along because you’re curious about the gravel roads and you’re hoping they might lead to some forgotten place in the recesses of your nostalgia. Or, maybe, you just like riding your bike no matter what and you’re really digging the options the off-track routes offer.

You might be a local, or maybe new to town. Either way, your route is taking you far and wide to places you’ve never visited. You’ve never quite seen the surrounding mountains as they are this day and suddenly your fingers warm up a bit. You spot some cows in an adjacent field, maybe even an Alpaca or two. You might even see a bear, or at least a big sign that warns you about them. “I’ll just keep going”, you think to yourself, and eventually you meander back to where you started, across the highway, over the railroad tracks, past the pawn shop, ending up at the local brewery. The IPA is the best you’ve ever tasted.

That, my friends, is the ¾ Minus Cykeltur. Your bike and your ass are covered in sand and small stones. You wonder where all that fine stuff came from. That’s the ¾ Minus part of your adventure. The road builders used it on those gravel roads – gravel pieces three-quarters of an ich and smaller. You’ll need to wash your chamois a couple time to get it all out. The Cykeltur part of it is all the rest. The cows, the bears, the mountains, the pawn shop, the epiphanies, and the beer. Cykeltur (pronounced see-cul-tour) is Danish for bike tour. So, ¾ Minus Cykeltur basically means gravel bike tour.