Domestic Tourism

April has come and gone. The weather did get briefly better, but only for a fortnight, and here we are in the first of May enjoying temperatures that would be right at home in February.

April was a busy month, and it was a busy-ness that meant that parents and children were only rarely together. The girls were busy with school and the hectic conclusion of the 2018-2019 handball season, while Trine and I were busy with the usual stuff — only moreso.

Two events dominated my camera roll in April: a visit from Karl Foster and his family the first four or five days of the Easter break, and then our entire family out in Jylland for the Holstebro Cup for most of the rest of that week. Most of the pictures in this post relate to those two themes.

So this blog post is lighter than usual on pictures of its central subjects.

That much said, let’s get this thing rolling.

We’ll start with something we haven’t seen in about seven or eight years: water in the pool!

Unfortunately, it’s back flow from the neighborhood waterworks: having turned off the water to make some repairs to the neighborhood pipes, they turned it back on and the crazy pressure forced water up into the pool. (I had a grand old time this weekend bailing it out. Yes, thanks to scheduling and illness, it took me that long to get around to it. We’re lucky none of us caught West Nile Virus!) In fairness to the authorities, we were forewarned about the possibility of a pressure surge, and all homeowners in the neighborhood were urged to ensure that our toilet covers were down for the big event, lest the surge burp water up out of our toilets. We followed their instructions and were at least spared that.

In the days leading up to the Easter break (and during the Easter break, which I did not take off from work), I had some transportation problems with my commute: DSB was doing some work on our line of the S-Tog, so that one had to switch from a train to a bus and back to a train on the way into and out of Copenhagen. That added half an hour to my commute in each direction. Making it even worse, my “work bike” got a flat and the company that repairs PensionDanmark bicycles wouldn’t be able to repair until my very last day of work before my own five-day holiday.

Fortunately, Copenhagen had just been deluged with rentable electric scooters. They’re all over the city. You install an app on your phone, load a credit card into it, and voila! You can open a map showing you every nearby scooter, and you can rent one for 1.5 kroner per minute (plus a 10-kroner “unlocking” fee). They go 20 km per hour, which is a pretty good clip. So instead of biking between work and Østerport Station, I got to ride an electric scooter twice a day… it wasn’t just quick, it was fun!

…even when the weather wasn’t:

It’s hard to make out, but that really is snow flurrying down.

On the Saturday of the weekend before Easter weekend–the first day of the girls’ ten-day Easter vacation–I woke up early and drove out to the airport to pick up an old childhood friend: Karl Foster.

Karl had been a good friend through junior high school all the way up to our sophomore year of high school, in the middle of which he moved to Virginia. He visited Marblehead once or twice before I graduated, and we wrote each other a couple of letters in the middle 1980s, and that was pretty much the end of our contact. Then courtesy of Facebook we got back in touch a few years ago, and suddenly he and his wife and their youngest son were our house guests.

I’m going to minimize the pictures of their visit, since readers of this blog probably don’t remember Karl Foster very well, but I’m not skipping their pictures entirely because we did a lot of tourism together and it’s always nice to have touristy pictures in here once in a while.

We spent one day out in Roskilde, starting out at the Viking Museum:

Then we paid a visit to Domkirken, the resting place of Danish kings. It was the first time I’d ever managed to set foot inside the cathedral, and I was struck by its magnificence. So brace for a lot of pictures without any (living) people in them.

After our Saturday in Roskilde, I got much more ambitious on Sunday. We got an early start and drove up to Gilleleje on the north coast of Sjælland.

I’d been telling Karl over and over that biking was big in Denmark, but I’m not sure he understood until about this point:

From Gilleleje we drove east along the coast to this familiar place:

…and I will skip all the pictures taken in and around Kronborg, because this blog has been there, done that enough.

Having wandered the battlements of Hamlet’s castle, we boarded the ferry for that shithole across the sound.

Note for the historical record: I wasn’t able to take advantage of it at the time, but there’s a fantastic whiskey bar right next to the ferry terminal in Helsingborg:

(We’ll let that serve as the only photo of Sweden; I’d rather not pollute this blog with pictures of that infernal wasteland.)

Back in Denmark, we drove down Sjælland’s east coast to Dyrehaven. I had hoped to show them Louisiana along the way, but the museum was closed and, what was worse, I didn’t realize the entire property was basically sealed off whenever the museum isn’t open. So I couldn’t even show them the beautiful grounds.

We walked through the woods to Bakken. The parking lots were empty and the woods were still and silent and very unpeopled. It was cool and the sun had begun to set. I think I may have freaked the poor family out a little by leading them deeper and deeper into a cold, dark, lonely forest.

I therefore suspect they were more than a little relieved to find that Bakken wasn’t just something I’d made up to lure them out into the woods.

Having enjoyed a Swedish lunch in Sweden, we then enjoyed a Danish dinner in Denmark: all-you-can-eat Stegt Flæsk with potatoes in parsley sauce. I think Karl’s appreciation for his Danish heritage doubled on the spot.

We got home late, and I had to work the following day. The Fosters entertained themselves in town on Tuesday, so after dinner that night it was time to say goodbye. . . which is right around when I realized that for all the many pictures I’d taken, and they’d taken, we didn’t have a single shot of me and Karl together.

(And no, I haven’t had a stroke or anything, I have no idea why my left eye appears to be melting!)

Thursday morning was time for the girls to board the bus to the Holstebro Cup.

Shortly after seeing them off, Trine and I set off for Jylland in the car.

We made one brief stop in Nyborg to stretch our legs.

…and by 17:30 we’d arrived at our hotel, which was kind of a strange affair. There was a big central hotel, in what I suppose you could call a traditional style, but it was in the middle of a business park of some kind and a lot of the hotel rooms — ours inclusive — were on floors of office buildings.

We were staying in “The IT House:”

…from whose entrance we could look back at the main hotel itself.

The IT House was apparently chock full of IT consultancies during normal business hours:

Our hotel was in Silkeborg, by the way, about a one-hour drive from Holstebro. We wanted to have a nice dinner out, just the two of us, and after doing a lot of online research and a quick reconnaissance tour of the city center, we opted for the only restaurant in easy walking distance from our hotel. It was called L’Orangeriet, and it was spectacular.

At Trine’s request, I add the following for the historical record:

It was simple and elegant and delicious starter: radish slices, sprouts, and thin-sliced parma ham in a pesto dressing. “Get a picture of it,” Trine said as I was just about to finish mine off, “I want to remember it so we can make it some time.”

So I did.

It was not the most crowded restaurant on Maundy Thursday:

But it really was excellent, as the sight of our rib-eyes will attest:

I had more pictures of our food, and the menu, but really — who cares?

The restaurant had some original artwork I quite liked:

It’s stupid modern nonsense, but it’s stupid modern nonsense I found aesthetically pleasing. The artist is Jesper Knudsen; he’s just a year older than me.

The moon was rising over “the compound” as we walked back to the IT House.

Here’s a shot of the hotel proper, taken the following morning on our way to breakfast:

It had been nice to have a romantic evening to ourselves, but come Friday it was time for some handball. We began the day at Molli’s venue in Mejrup, on the opposite side of Holstebro from Maddie’s venue in Vemb.

I don’t have pictures of Molli’s early game because I livestreamed the whole match to Nana and Pop-Pop over Skype. (Trine and I would end up taking advantage of another parent’s Facebook live stream of Molli’s semi-final match on our drive home Saturday.)

The girls won easily.

And as soon as the game was over, we had to jump in the car to make the half-hour ride to Maddie’s venue in Vemb.

They, too, won handily.

The girls’ schedules meant that Trine and I now had a couple of hours to kill before Maddie’s next game, after which we’d have to fly back across town to catch Molli’s evening game.

We bought some lunch stuff at the only grocery store open in Vemb, then drove around 45 minutes trying to find a picturesque spot to dine. That included our dodging the bullet of some bizarre “Nature Park” in the middle of absolutely nowhere, which sounded intriguing until we got close to it, at which point we realized (thanks to Trine’s diligent and slightly panicked research as we drove deeper and deeper along a dirt road through a dark wood toward absolutely nothing) that the “Nature Park” sounded like some lonely old guy’s big old yard in the middle of the woods.

We ended up at Skærum Mill, an historical relic of a bygone era.

…Then it was back to Vemb sports hall.

No pictures from Maddie’s second game because it did not go well.

As soon as it ended, we dashed across town to catch the older girls’ game. Here’s coach Sven-Erik giving the girls a little talk after the game, which was another solid win that propelled them into the semi-finals. (I tried to get some pics from the game,

By then it was around 20:00, so Trine and I made our way into central Holstebro for dinner.

We had a nice dinner at an American-themed chain restaurant then made the long drive back to Silkeborg.

I took this mirror selfie the next morning because it was the precise moment at which I decided I would not wakeup another morning with such hair–I am not auditioning for a mad scientist!

After breakfasting at the hotel, Trine and I wandered into the aquarium next door, Aqua.

It wasn’t a spectacular aquarium, but it was interesting enough. They had a whole section dedicated to eels, and Trine found that particularly intriguing because apparently Oldemor had done some eel-mongering back in the day. (I suppose I’d known that, and may have even talked about in a previous blog post in which Oldemor taught Molli Malou how to dismember a smoked eel one Easter — you may recall pictures of Molli Malou playing with the decapitated eel head as though it were a puppet.)

In any case, I include the following few photos as representative.

We were lucky enough to be on hand for the otter feeding: an animal trainer of some kind came out and tossed dead ducklings or baby chicks of some other avian species out to the otters, explaining to us as the otters went to their grisly dining that otters always begin by decapitating whatever animal they’ve chosen to eat, “to make sure it’s dead.”

Clever otters. Not so sure that “playful” is the word I’ll associate with them going forward.

From the aquarium we made our way to Silkeborg, where the center square was occupied by a Farmer’s Market. Since this was the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, and because the weather was nice, everything was open and the people were out in force.

The only destination we both felt strongly about visiting was the Silkeborg Museum, which is the home of Tollund Man (and Elling Woman). More about them in a minute. First, some personal vindication:

What you’ve just seen is a series of photographs of common Bronze Age artifacts from Denmark. What you may not have noticed, but I certainly did, is that many of those artifacts happen to look an awful lot like the collection I’ve amassed of finds on our own property; finds that secretly delight my inner child but which Trine has for all these many years referred to as, “your stupid rock collection.”

Stupid rocks indeed! They are bronze age artifacts! And in fact, I am now fairly confident they are genuine “grain scrapers,” like those you see in the photo immediately preceding these paragraphs about my splendid Bronze Age Artifacts.

There was also a display of old glasses — Silkeborg was the glassworks capital of Denmark from 1582-1610. I am opting to skip most of those pictures, because most of you are familiar with what a glass is and what it looks like. The central design principles for drinking glasses have not changed much over the centuries.

But I liked this decanter:

(“Drink with pleasure, drink with style, drink, but let reason prevail!”)

Also: there was a patron saint of glass. But I didn’t make a note of his name.

There was more to the museum than rocks and glasses, but I’m opting to skip over a lot of those photos as well because I just don’t see them as very relevant or interesting… Although I did like seeing this recreation of the town bigwig’s living room circa the late 1800s:

And now to Tollund Man.

Tollund Man was hanged to death at some point between 405 and 384 BC, in the middle of Denmark’s iron age. His body was apparently tossed into a peat bog, where it was preserved until sometime around 1950, when some peat farmers discovered him.

That was about 12 years after Elling Woman was discovered. This was a woman buried in the same peat bog, less than 100 meters from the spot where Tollund Man would be discovered a mere dozen years later. She too had been hanged, at some point between 360 and 210 BC.

Unfortunately, the man who found Elling Woman first assumed her to be an animal, and dug her up “incautiously” until coming across a belt — at which point he realized his subject was human. By then he’d destroyed most of her remains, but astonishingly her hair was recovered intact, still braided just as she must have braided it the very day of her death.

So here is Elling Woman:

And here is Tollund Man:

And why not cleanse your palate now with some some refreshing Silkeborg beer?

Silkeborg itself was a pretty city with an active little waterfront.

And that more or less concluded our tour of Silkeborg: we then drove home and celebrated Easter with a lunch at Kirsten’s apartment, with Sten and Malene and most of their children.

Before I leave Jylland behind, however, I thought I should include the pictures we got via SMS from one of the team fathers, Rune, who was kind enough to keep all parents posted on the goings-on of Maddie’s team. So here without further comment are snippets from the stream of photos we received from Rune over the course of the long weekend…. they may not mean much to most of us, but future Maddie will surely be happy to revisit them.

The Easter Bunny was obviously thrown off his game by our absence, but he did manage to get some chocolate eggs hidden around the yard at some point. Molli Malou declined to participate in the hunt (which the Easter Bunny has surely noted in his Solemn Ledger of Children Who Shall Receive No Future Easter Treats), leaving the field wide open to Maddie.

…er, Maddie plus one.

It may have been a mistake letting Didi in on the hunt: the buoy out in Søndersø that has always transfixed her has probably now been identified as a rogue Easter Egg!