It’s going to be a very, very busy week, culminating with the arrival of Mollis farmor on Friday, but I thought I could spent twenty minutes or so on a Molli update from this weekend. Please forgive my brevity.
Here’s how the trip worked: late Friday morning we piled into the car—Gert’s Thunderbird, which he loaned us so we wouldn’t have to drive our ailing Corolla—and drove about 90 minutes to Kalundborg, where we drove onto the ferry to Århus after a very unsatisfying lunch in the lovely little city of Kalundborg proper (somehow we found ourselves at a little cafe whose habitues seemed to include all the local drunks and troublemakers, and the food was even worse than the chain-smoking clientele). The ferry took about 2 1/2 hours. It was a warm lovely day, but we kept inside the cabin most of the trip out of consideration for Molli. She didn’t get seasick (nor had she gotten carsick), which we considered an accomplishment in itself, and she didn’t even seem to mind it when we finally took her out on the deck—despite the evidence of the photo below.
Once we landed at Århus, it was a 2 1/2 hour drive to Aalbæk, the town where we had our hotel reservations. Molli made it almost entirely without a peep, although she got restless and screamy the last 10-15 minutes of the trip. All things considered, she’d handled four hours of driving and 2 1/2 hours “sailing” with astonishing calm.
It was getting dark when we arrived at Aalbæk, but here’s what our hotel looked like in daylight (the picture is taken from the gangway outside our first- (second-) floor room.
We had a delicious gourmet dinner in their nice restaurant, but had to take turns walking Molli, because after the long day she’d had she was in no mood to lie dormant while mom and dad enjoyed a fine meal. She’d had to eat on the road; how dare we presume to eat so comfortably?
First thing next morning we drove up to Skagen, about 20km further north, to the northernmost parking lot on continental Europe. Yes, yes, of course Norway, Sweden, and parts of Russia and Finland and God knows what else are further north within Europe, but all the literature brags about Skagen being the “northernmost point of continental Europe.” And it makes a certain amount of sense when you look at a map.
Anyway, we parked the car, then rode the “Sandworm” out to the northernmost beach on continental Europe, where we took turns strolling out into the water to become the northernmost people on continental Europe. At one point the three of us were out there together—the northernmost family on continental Europe.
You’ll notice the waves seem to be coming in at odd angles. That’s because Skagen’s real claim to fame is not so much its northernmostness, but its location as the precise point where two seas (Skaggerak and Kattegat) collide. In the pictures above, Trine and I have one foot in each see. It’s kind of like the four-corners in the U.S., only wetter.
After Skagen we drove down to a little forest-preserve type park in the midst of which stood tilsandede kirken, or “the sanded-under church.” It’s a church that got buried by the shifting sands of the area, to the extent that only the tower now shows. The rest is underground, and completely inaccessible to tourists.
We spent the afternoon in the town of Skagen, had a nice little lunch there, then went back to the hotel and napped. Another gourmet dinner, through which Molli was kind enough to sleep, then wine and cheese on our patio where we developed our apparently not-so-great fantasy football drafting strategies. The next morning we rose and drove home—no ferries, this time: just a long drive down through Jylland, across Fyn, and into Sjælland. In Fyn we stopped for a visit to Odense, where we had lunch at the H.C. Andersen museum cafe and visited his birth and childhood homes. The last pic is me in front of the latter. Molli is stirring, so that’ll be that. (There are many, many more pictures, some of them very lovely, but they’ll have to wait.)
