Rain on Langeland

We packed up our mule and drove out to a meet John, Sandie, and Liam at a gas station near Frederiksberg Town Hall at about 4:30 Friday afternoon. We agreed on our convoy tactics and nosed our mules west. It began to rain.

By the time we were halfway across Sjælland, it was raining so hard we could hardly hear Barney singing to Molli in the back seat. By the time we reached the Big Strait Bridge it was raining so hard, and gusting so strongly, and the air was so frequently rent by thunder and lightning, that Trine nearly had an anxiety attack just trying to cross the bridge at 30 miles an hour… while I sat stone-faced beside her, white-knuckled and terrified, pretending I didn’t expect to be vaporized by lightning at any moment as we hydroplaned over the strait in winds that buffeted the car and threatened to cast us off the bridge and into the choppy water some quarter-mile below us.

We lost John and Sandie not long after the bridge. They’d gotten ahead of us. They called us to tell us so and ask if we wanted them to pull over and wait for us. But it turned out they were well on their way toward Jutland, having long ago passed the exit for the highway down to Langeland.

By the time we reached southern Fyn and were nearing the bridge to Langeland, John and Sandie had corrected their course but were considerably behind us. Liam was pining for a meal. We said we would pull over at the next reasonable looking shelter (we were now in monsoon conditions) and wait for them. We ended up in a Statoil gas station. We waited ten minutes in the gas station convenience store for their arrival, and then it was another twenty minutes before Liam was fed, directions were confirmed, and we were back on the road. Half an hour later we reached the summer house. It hadn’t been opened since last fall. It smelled of mildew and sour water. It was cold. It was dark. And it was the most blessed place we’d ever seen.

The rain came and went all weekend, but there was only one twenty-minute window of sunshine the whole time we were there. We made the most of it, as you’ll see below.

The skies cleared briefly as we packed up the cars and hit the road on Sunday, but it was already gray and miserable again by the time we got back on Fyn.

It was somehow a great weekend anyway, thanks to Molli and Liam, who went from indifference to tentative exploration of one another to all-out territorial brawling to a final uneasy peace that allowed them to play cooperatively.

Here’s the house (any photos with sun in them were taken Saturday afternoon between about 12:20 and 12:40).

John and I took a brief walk just before the sun came out Saturday, and I took some pictures of the little cottages along the way. They have no significance except to give a sense of what the architecture is like on the island.

Most of the island (as we saw it) was not houses like those above, however, but fields like that below:

But the houses were certainly nicer to look at:

Back at the house, Molli and Liam were beginning to bond.

We decided to grill our lunch since the rain had stopped and the sun was threatening. While John and I hung out by the grill on the patio, Molli did her best to force herself through the glass patio door:

With no provocation whatever, she began licking the glass of the door. I don’t know where she came up with the idea. The only time she’s ever seen anyone do anything like that is when she’s in her car seat and I press my face against the rear window to make her laugh and relax while Trine buckles her in (or out).

She went absolutely berserk on that door, I tell you! This next one is the best shot of all. If you want a full-size copy, let me know… if you use it as a desktop background, it looks like Molli’s stuck behind your computer screen trying to get out:

And, of course, you can also download the video (4.3MB) on demand. It’s right up there with the Dancing Queen video, and we eagerly await the Chelmsford sequel.

The next three shots represent the only sliver of time we were all out in sunshine all weekend.

First, Trine and Molli:

Then the three of us with Sandie and Liam:

And finally one of the six of us:

Despite more bad weather we decided to trek out to the local castle in Tranekær. The same family has owned the joint since 1405.

The weather was so cold and rainy we decided to make the most of our misery. This is therefore a slightly posed photo, in which everyone is trying to look as wretched as possible:

Behind the castle lay a little pond, and there was a rickety old pier jutting into it. We took a series of photos on that slippery pier and were lucky not to have ended up with any swimming shots:

We’re smiling, but trust me: we’re cold, we’re drenched, and we’re only laughing because we can’t believe how awful it is:

Back at the summer house we let the kids play for a while together before hunkering down to the old international summer rain-out standby: Monopoly. Here are two cute shots of Molli and Liam standing at the coffee table:

Sunday was just as awful, weather-wise, as Saturday had been. It didn’t rain as often or as hard, but the sun never came out, either. We took a long stroll into some nearby woods to give the kids a fresh-air nap, and made it to an old pre-Viking ruin. It’s a burial mound from about 3000 B.C., if you can believe it, and there was no admission charge, no souvenier booth, nothing whatever of the kind. Just the mound itself with a little placard telling us all about it.

So here are three shots of us posing with the remains of 5000-year-old barbarians:

Once we got back to the summer house all we did was eat, clean, pack, and leave.

The sun came out as we left.