We’re halfway through our summer vacation as I write this. It’s Wednesday, the 24th of July, aka International Sophie Lee Day (happy birthday, Soph!).
Before I get into current stuff, a couple of stragglers that should have been in last month’s post—just a few pictures of the Asheville Nagans at Tivoli from Trine’s phone.
It’s hard to make out, especially given that I always have to shrink resolution to fit all the pics into the blog, but the girls are in the first fully visible row to the left of the big post.
Our vacation got off to a weird start: Denmark was under all sorts of storm warnings that first Saturday. We were warned to expect ungodly amounts of rain, accompanied by heavy winds and thunderstorms. Trine and I spent the whole day on edge, monitoring the weather radar certain that we were going to have to spend a lot of our first full day of vacation bailing out the garage stairwell.
In the end we just a Very Soggy Saturday. Had we not been given all the apocalyptic warnings and advisories, we probably would have shrugged it off as yet another rainy day.
We went to bed early enough not to learn about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump until we woke up the next morning. That made for a weird Sunday. And American politics only got crazier from there. That’s all the Big World Stuff that history will remember about July 2024.
But here’s a more personal milestone from July 2024: I hit the 11k mark on my bike!
The following four pictures are just for the permanent record: our roofers claim the persistent leak we experience in the living room during cloudbursts—despite the brand new expensive roof they installed just 2 years ago—is the consequence of our chimney fan not being properly sealed. Meaning we’re going to have people who know what they’re doing seal it properly, meaning I’ll want these pictures easily accessible:
For months my biking commute was complicated by the third-world level potholes on the road I take through Hareskov. Big potholes, lots of them, some of them an an inch or two deep.
The first week of July, the road was shut down to traffic and completely repaved.
(Obviously the right lane wasn’t completely repaved yet in that photo.)
On my last day of biking in to the office before vacation, the first half of my ride was enhanced not just by the smooth excellence of new pavement, but by the company of a magnificent rainbow.
“An omen!” I thought. “A portent of how awesome this vacation is going to be!”
It was an omen, all right: an omen of an incoming rainstorm that would soak me to the bone before I reached the office.
Question: is Greg a little obsessive about weird and stupid things?
Answer:
Bonus commentary: it’s harder than you might think to maintain an exact speed and get a picture of your speedometer. But how very well worth it to have a picture of my bike display showing all 1s!
(Right?)
Because Molli was at Roskilde on her actual birthday, and because our lives are very difficult to synchronize, we didn’t celebrate her actual birthday until July 15.
Twenty years old!
It was just a small family affair: the four of us, Mormor, Jørgen, Moster Mette, and the Lucases.
Coming home from a walk with Didi the next day (yet another rainy summer day in Denmark), I noticed we live in an invisible house:
That’s our corner, our house is in there, it’s just absolutely invisible to the neighborhood. I like that.
Mormor was up in Rørvig on the 17th and sent us this picture:
That afternoon, Trine and I hopped on a flight to Wroclaw, Poland, to visit our old friend Lisa. She’s been living there for 12 years and yet this was our first visit. Not only that, but Trine and I had never visited Poland together (unless you count the busride we took through it on our way to Prague in 2003).
We weren’t really settled into our hotel until after 19:30 or so, at which point we set out into the city to have a look around and get some dinner.
I’ll keep commentary to a minimum, because most of the pictures could be characterized the same way: “Trine, Lisa, and I walked around Wroclaw and looked at stuff.”
We ate dinner that first night at a place with traditional Polish cuisine, and at Lisa’s encouragement we got a traditional platter for two.
I don’t remember what it’s all called, but I wasn’t that absorbed in the meal: on the flight out, I’d had a cup of coffee that gave me stomach problems almost immediately and the gastric distress from that stupid cup of black poison lasted all the way until the next morning.
The restaurant was themed with Polish liberation memorabilia: liberation from the Nazis and then communists. I don’t know why they had these big cardboard cutouts standing up near our table, but look at them closely:
Could that not be Dan Akroyd, Keifer Sutherland, and Sam Rockwell?
Not all at once, obviously, because these guys are all about the same age whereas those actors are decades apart, but it’s fun to imagine a comedy in which those three guys, at their peaks, were thrown into a situation where they ended up in some Polish resistance brigade.
“Spit and Polish,” maybe.
Or “Pole Position.”
Anyway. . .
That orange blob mid frame is the moon. It was not just big and orange—much bigger and oranger than it looks there—but also looked weirdly misshapen. Given how weird the world was getting, it seemed like an homage to 1Q84.
We slept in at our hotel, breakfasted, and met Lisa at her apartment a little after noon.
Not far from her home was an old train station that no longer received trains but had instead been converted into a massive food court and outdoor cafe.
We had thought we would just sit out on “Cathedral Island” to talk and sip some scotch, but as soon as I saw there were boats for rent I insisted we rent a motorized catamaran for an hour’s cruise on the Oder.
It was just an hour, but the weather was beautiful (and hot: we were grateful for the canopy) and we had brought some scotch along, so just enjoy the ride and the view.
After the cruise we meandered around the city a little more.
Wroclaw bills itself as a city of gnomes. I don’t remember why—or maybe no one ever told me. But there are little gnomes all over the place, most of them engaged in activities relevant to their location. This little fella was burdened with the locks of all the bikes the city had to cut away from the railings of the bridge on which he made his home.
This frieze was on one of the columns inside the cathedral.
I’m guessing that’s Salomé receiving the severed head of John the Baptist, but that’s just a guess.
As in every cathedral we visit, I lit candles for Nana and Pop-Pop.
That picture above isn’t taken with any kind of filter or anything: it’s just an architecturally very weird building.
We finally settled in for dinner at a steakhouse.
It was excellent: reminded us very much of that steakhouse we used to visit down in Faro.
Lisa took us to one of her favorite pubs, a joint called “Master and Margarita.” It was very nice, but a little more crowded and noisy than we liked, so as soon as a band started setting up we got out of there.
And Lisa led us into some forgotten and forlorn corner of the city, where nestled into the ruins of an old abandoned building was her favorite bar: Druknaria, I think it was called.
There was another bar (or another couple of bars) down the alley.
And the alley was, frankly. . . a little gross.
It’s not just that there were rats around: it’s that they were everywhere.
But we had a grand old time anyway.
(Note the rat by the drainage grate in the background!)
We spent a surprisingly short four hours there, drinking whiskey and meeting a great mix of people—including this Canadian named Greg.
Been in Europe 21 years now, and that’s the first Greg I’ve met.
Although, who knows: maybe some of the non-human guests were named Greg. . .
Trine and I left Lisa at Druknaria and made our woozy way back to the hotel, slept, breakfasted, checked out, schlepped our bags (just backpacks) over to Lisa’s, and we spent a few leisurely hours with her that afternoon—including some great pierogie and latkes at some joint right around the corner from her apartment.
We wrapped things up with coffee and tea at a cafe (Mleczarnia) in the courtyard beside the only synagogue that survived the Nazi occupation—and only survived because they used it as an administrative office.
The courtyard itself was used by the Nazis for executions, which made it kind of creepy. Lisa said she calls the old and massive chestnut tree in the courtyard “the Witness” because of what it must have seen.
The last Wroclaw picture on my film roll was just a reminder to myself that the big gas company in Poland had a very familiar name.
We took an uber to the airport, where our flight was delayed for two hours. We assumed it was part of the Counterstrike IT failure that had been disabling the entire western world all day, but weren’t given an explanation for the delay until we boarded.
It turned out to have nothing to do with Counterstrike. The plane had struck four birds during its arrival at Wroclaw and therefore had to be thoroughly inspected, and a whole host of formalities had to be observed before the plane could be approved as airworthy.
It was after midnight by the time Trine and I were making our way home from the Værløse train station, and the same crazy big moon was shining down on us.
And that’s it, that’s Summer Vacation part 1.
Molli is down in Corfu with a bunch of her girlfriends as I write this, and tomorrow Trine, Maddie, and I set off for Seaden Sea World in Turkey, not far from the Waterworld resort where we stayed back in 2018.
So there’s a lot to do and not much time left to get it all done.
See you in Summer Vacation Part 2!
