Femø, another picturesque Danish Isle

We stopped here for a walk and lunch as it was on our way from Femo to Eslov. The airstrip belongs to a guesthouse at the centre of town/the island. We had planned to stay the night, but it was too expensive at €100. Lunch was fun and typically danish: we had no idea that our grilled fish would be served on bread! Landing is free if you purchase something.

Ju lunching

Before lunch we walked all over the island, there are lots of little jam stalls and it's very relaxing. We walked past the pond and could hear a lot of very loud ducks, but couldn'twork out why we couldn't see them...... turns out they were frogs.

Syd Fyn Taasinge, a flying visit

Had to add this lovely picture of a yacht.  I was pleased that I managed to find the owner and send them a copy :-)

Sovdeborg, a very pretty little town, a bit sleepy on a Sunday

The club members were really lovely

Aerø half timbered houses and model ships on windowsills

Aero from the air

A particularly nice picnic lunch on the airfield at Aero

We had a few more days to spare in Denmark before the Eslöv fly in, so we decided to finally see Aerø - something we hadn't done so far as we try to land where the landing fee is cheap. There is no club at the airfield, as it is a commercial enterprise, but we were lucky to be allowed to camp and use their shower for 2 nights.

The airfield dog inspecting our equipment.  Why do dogs never smile for photos???

Aerø seems wealthier and more touristy than Samsø, with very attractive half timbered houses in Aerøsköbing, a short bike ride away. (Bikes and a car are also available for hire at the airfield). Nearby Marstal also has a lot of museums and is restoring an old ship, so is another interesting place for a visit.

Marstal from the air

We were probably lucky that we arrived a couple of week before the main tourist season started, as there were already quite a few Germans bobbing around in hire yachts and I can imagine the narrow cobbled laneways get clogged in the season.

Ju at the beach

Aero used to be to a large extent under water, one of the things we saw from the air was this fantastic raised farmhouse....

raised farmhouse with bridge between house and barns..

Pannkosh, the big Danish pancake fly-in

flying into the farm

We weren't sure to do one gray Sunday and we wanted to catch up with Lars, who said why not come to the big pancake fly-in. At the mention of pancakes I was sold.

pancake house in former border control box

Pannkosh is held the last Sunday each month over summer and all proceeds go to a Danish childrens charity. There are two pans and a whole heap of batter and jam and you go for it.

It is held at Revninge airstrip, near Odense and we were given a very warm welcome by the owner and his wife (who gave me a lace Danish heart she.makes herself - currently adorning my jacket, although it needs a little more starch after a couple of weeks).

Erik and his wife, owners of Revninge airstrip

Pannkosh is the brainchild of Bo 'crazy dane' Ronnow, who does a lot of charity work as well as aviation work: when we met him it was a week before a trip of 30 microlights up to the Finnish islands off the Stockholm archipelago.

Bo 'Crazy Dane' Ronnow

Lunch flight to Dragsholm Slot

We read a review of this restaurant in the paper in Australia and figured that Cris and Rosi's visit warranted going to a nice restaurant. So we found the nearest airfield (Kalundborg) and landed. Who would have thought how difficult it could be to get a taxi in the country. Luckily Micheal an ex-Danish jet pilot gave us a lift and told us a little about working for the Danish air force and working as a trainer in Texas, which was a fascinating counterpoint to Wolf's experiences in the DDR.

Kalundborg airfield's art

The castle was lovely, as was lunch. We ate in the bistro eatery rather than the gourmet restaurant and had the 3 course set menu. The food was very good, though I had expected more herbs and fresh vegetables in spring. Several of the dishes used a really dry, crumbled chocolate biscuit as an ingredient, which worked surprisingly well.

After lunch the retaurant manager very kindly gave s a tour of the castle, including the bones of a teenage girl who was bricked into a wall for an inappropriate pregnancy by her father. Cris took photographs behind himself as we walked away, but her ghost was not to be seen. We then digested for a while in the rhododendron garden and snacked on a few wild garlic leaves.

Starter of cured salmon, radish and cucumber from the garden, microherbs, wild garlic cheese and toasted breadcrumbs, yum

Dessert of caramel with meringue, crunchy oaty stuff, crunchy chocolate biscuity stuff, sanddorn which have a great acidity to offset the sweetness, and a yoghurt sorbet.  Sorry, too busy eating the main of shredded veal on mashed potato with chocolate crumbs and beetroot to photograph.  According to the very helpful staff we really should go back for a dinner at the gourmet restaurant and this taste of what they can do really tempts me....

Relaxing in Roskilde and environs

Cris and Rosi joined us as part of their European tour for a week, starting in Roskilde. No it wasn't festival time. Roskilde was the centre of the Danish empire and where Danish kings and queens were buried for centuries.
So we had a look at the cathedral, the Viking boat museum, which is really great, back around 900 the inhabitants sunk nine ships to act as a barrier to sea borne marauders. These ships were then refound in the late 60s and have been researched and reconstructed ever since.

Viking ship museum

The team with a viking ship

Cris with viking ship, note stones used for ballast

Valbekomme: picnic lunch beside the cathedral

Our last night staying in the very kind Roskilde Flyveklub's bunkhouse on the airfield was the double trouble of club meeting and day before a public holiday (=prayer day) and also first meeting of the season. So we had a good chat with the members who passed on some good airfield recommendations, ate the special prayer day buns with butter, drank the coffee and then drank a nice glass of Chateauneuf at the flag hoisting.

Roskilde is a major airport, but we met with a very warm welcome.

I made Rosi try a traditional danish icecream: 2 balls with guf (the pink stuff, which is like strawberry flavoured meringue mix) and a floedeboll, which is like a Schaumkuss (sorry can't remember correct PC name for them) or remotely related to the Australian snowball - uncooked fluffy stuff in the middle, a wafer base and chocolate on top.

Ju and Rosi outside a traditional thatched roofed house seen on our Roskilde fjord ride.

Copenhagen catch up

I had a couple more photos of Copenhagen that I really wanted to share, but just couldn't find.....  Of course, they were mixed in with Switzerland!

Handbag: nice or nasty?

Awww isn't he cute?

Ta daa!  Eva laughed herself sick that I'd thought her coffee warmer was her handbag....

Off to Konstanz

Burg Hohenzollern from the air - we just happened to fly past it and decided to orbit to have a closer look.  We also discovered a beautiful little village in flight.  It turned out to be Heidelberg.  Oh well, you can't always be the first to find something.

What, I hear you exclaim, you're flying right across Germany from Denmark, no stops to the Swiss border???  (Which equals about 5 hours flight in a small plane)

Julian had caught my cold and was still feeling a bit miserable at the tail end of it, so he couldn't fly without the comfort of his sleeping bag!

The reason for such madness, was that my uncle and aunt who live in Konstanz half the year were already about to start back to Australia and we really wanted to catch them before they left.

And we did stop, in Frankfurt Egelsbach, to meet the lovely plastic pilot and family.

Florence is the most amazing kid, not interested in dolls, but loves machines and really wants to fly.  She didn't really want to take no for an answer about flying away with our plane, and managed to find a 20cm2 space in the back seat for her mum to sit :-)  Such a cute kid.

By the time we arrived in Konstanz it was definitely mozzie-o-clock.  We've been really lucky in not having any mosquitos on our trip, despite the direst of warnings from the Swedes about Siljansnaes.  Here we were swarmed, and I felt very bad about my aunt Gisi's bare legs as she watched us unload and tie down the plane.  Luckily we're getting pretty quick at the entire unloading process, so we were underway in no time.

Konstanz, as you can see it's pretty much one town joined by a bridge the bit on the right belonging to Germany, but with parts further right being Swiss, which makes for lots of border crossings.

Design in and around Kolding

Morten and Birgitte were kind enough to lend us a car, which allowed us to see quite a bit despite having colds.  Among other things it allowed us to fill up with cheap automobile petrol from the local petrol station.

Julian wrangling with the Roundup container.

One of the most exciting things we went to in the area (apart from Legoland) was Trapholt design museum.  They had some great exhibitions of Danish furniture, some works by Lin Utzon (daughter of the designer of the Sydney Opera House who has designed a lot of crystal and has been doing interior design encouraged by her father since the age of 6) and some nice colourful art.  But most importantly they recently acquired Arne Jacobsen's summer house.

Arne Jacobsen's summer house

The summer house was designed as a prototype for a modular kit house (and as such isn't the finished article) - you decide the outside panels (glass or opaque) and the number of boxes and it's all prefabricated.  Nice.  Unfortunately the guy who owned the company (from my vague memory) died before the project was completed, so Arne ended up keeping the building as the family summer home.  It has some pretty interesting touches, like the indoor / outdoor stove.  I feel that maybe the flue is on the wrong side for heating up the house, but the idea of having one fireplace that serves both as an indoor fire and an outdoors bbq is really nice.

You may now be asking, who's Arne Jacobsen.  Well he's just one of the greatest Danish chair designers.

This is the famous egg chair, designed in 1956 and available in reproduction from all sorts of American online shops from USD 400 - 1300.  Seems almost a bargain!  Beside it the ant chair, which is really neat, the three legged design not only stacks well, but it also fits better under the table, also still in production.

There were lots of other great things to be seen at Trapholt (mainly chairs), which Julian & I have blogged about before, but the one below was sad and left out....

another neat chair at Trapholt

Morten and Birgitte have done an amazing job on building their own home, so they were great people to talk to about building, as were their neighbours who were making new bathrooms at that time.  One of the neighbour's suggestions was to have a look at the building design centre (other pictures here).

And this is some neat modular furniture at the building centre in Kolding - many medium sized towns in Denmark have such display cases for building ideas, materials and of course companies.

This is a really neat Danish bin design, a piece of bent steel, which is at an angle so that the plastic bag is under tension and held in and on.

Birgitte also took us to the local farm museum, which is something her father was instrumental in setting up (he liked to collect old farming equipment), so she grew up with a lot of the items on display.

you can see a lot of equipment in this picture, I'm playing with the potato digger.

Old wood fired stoves had rings that you remove to place a pan of the correct size in to heat.  This is a waffle pan designed to be used in this fashion.

This collection of bank notes really interested me, as it has a 20 German mark (DM) note from about 1923 and then a 20 billion DM note from about 1926.  I'd read about this inflation but it was fantastic to see it and understand how quickly it occured.  Of course this wiped out everyone's savings and was one of the factors leading to WWII.  Kolding is really quite close to the German border in these days of automobiles and is still on the trade route to Germany.

The Danes do a lot of things differently to the way we're accustomed to from England, Australia, France & Germany.  And I have to admit, that actually they do a lot of things better.  And I'm not just talking about chair design.  They have a very strong social system, employees (especially of the government) get great holidays and child care allowances.  Youth is integrated into society, which I'm guessing saves a huge amount of money as even if a child breaks a bus shelter or graffitis something, they then end up working with an adult in their community to repair the damage and the do not repeat the experience.  Of course this will be less effective in larger towns.  And they also BBQ differently.  I'm going to keep my head down on this one, but they do a great job of rare grilling sides of beef and grilling through turkey and herb cheese rolls.

A casual Friday night bbq for 80 or so volunteers from the local youth organisation.  The youth have a meeting room with a dozen computers, a projector for karaoke, pool and table tennis tables and three adults helping out, who also lend a sympathetic ear if the kids need someone to talk to who is not their parents.

Morten and Birgitte are very well organised so having a large event like this was no trouble for them at all, they are a great example of how important it is to pick your battles (and work together).

Birgitte's table decorations for the bbq - simple, using items from the kitchen / garden.  We watch the French version of Come Dine with Me here in France, Un Diner Presque Parfait, and they make this kind of effort to decorate their tables too.   Maybe a little practise is all I need.

We left Kolding having learnt and experienced a lot about Danish life with many ideas for our future projects and most impressed by Morten and Birgitte's enthusiasm and drive.  Hopefully we'll be back one day soon.

Can you see Morten & Birgitte flying by, taking photos of us as we leave???

Legoland Billund

The pearly gates....

Coming from Oz, I expected Legoland to be maybe a 3m giraffe and a gorilla, but it was so much more.  I didn't realise that Lego is a proudly Danish product until I got to Denmark and they've certainly pulled out all the stops for Legoland Billund, situated next to Lego headquarters.

Oh no! Swallowed by a lion.

You may have heard me complain occasionally that I've missed another UNESCO world heritage site due to weather / schedule / being too lazy to cycle the distance from the closest airfield.  Well, I shall complain no more, as I've seen them in Lego size.....

The tourist boat floats past the historic Bergen Bryggen, where the Hansaeatic trading guild had their commercial buildings

Maybe you, like me thought that Legoland is all about static displays, well, I was very mistaken.  There is a whole range of rides and most displays have moving sections - for example the Bergen display above has a tourist boat that floats along the river extolling the virtues of Bergen. 

Why not make a monster movie???  You control the camera.

Birgitte has blue eyes and blonde hair and knows exactly how to get a bargain: there is free entry to Legoland for the last 1.5h of the day, no rides included, but rides only close 1h before Legoland closes; which gave us the opportunity to go up the twisty ride from which you can see Legoland from above, including our particular favourite, Legoland's version of Billund airport, with the real Billund airport right behind it.  

And Lego Billund, which includes my favourite kind of glider: plywood chair with wings attached....

We also got to take a magical journey to Atlantis - what's better in life than yellow men exploring an aquarium???

  

On the treasure hunt in Atlantis...