After we arrived at the airport, I checked the car reservation and realized that we rented a manual car. I lack any experience driving a manual, so I put my AirPods in and watched a 20-minute instructional video as we walked the long walk down the terminals to the car rental place at the airport. We later learned that the car we rented only had been driven 10 kilometers. I gotta say, in the first few minutes of trying to drive manual, it almost didn’t make it to the 11th kilometer. However, after about 10 minutes of stalling the car too many times, I was starting to get the hang of it.
Our first stop was south of Copenhagen, near the cliffs of Mons Klint. These cliffs sit on the east coast of the country and tower about 400 feet above the Baltic Sea. We spent the first night in the only town of this area and then the next morning we headed to the cliffs. The fog was intense. We could hardly see in front of us. Once we got to the cliffs, we were about the only ones there. We walked the many steps down and then we got to the bottom. We walked the many steps down and as we walked down through the forest, the fog started to dissipate slightly. We finally got down towards the bottom and had a nice viewing point where we sat for about 45 minutes and watched the fog slowly lift off of the cliffs. Unfortunately, the access to the beach was closed as a storm had taken out the stairs many months back. It looked pretty hard to repair, so I don’t blame them for not fixing it yet.
After our time in Mons Klint, we traveled to the city of Odense, which is the third most populated city in Denmark with about 180,000 people. We stopped about every 45 minutes to visit a smaller town along the way. And then we finally got to the bridge that was debated for many years before being built. This bridge cost about two and a half billion dollars to build and took about 10 years. It opened up access from the east and the west part of the country without the need of taking an hour-long ferry instead. The toll to get over the bridge is about $40 just for one way and stretches a few kilometers. The top of the bridge is the largest freestanding structure in all of Denmark.
Once we got to Odense, the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, we settled into the bed and breakfast and went out for a nice dinner in the city. The next morning we went to the museum of Hans Christian Andersen, one of the most famous historical figures of Denmark outside of the royalty. He created many of the most iconic fairy tales, including the Ugly Duckling, the Little Mermaid, the Princess and the Pea, the Tin Soldier, and about 150 more. He was quite a sorrowful man as well and didn’t seem all that confident with women. We think if he had been, he probably wouldn’t have been such a prolific writer.
After our time at the Hans Christian Andersen Museum, we went for a boat ride down the canal through a park. This was so I could take the synchronous class that I had as I’m currently in grad school and had a zoom call at 2pm. I thought it would be best to join class from a boat. My classmates were a bit jealous of my background and I wasn’t sure what the professor thought as she watched the trees pass behind my head while I was trying to engage in the lecture. After the boat, we went further south and went to the oldest farm still preserved in Denmark. We got to see the traditional way of life and how they set up their rural communities. The next day would be our last full day in the Odense area. So we first went north and went to a Viking museum where the only preserved Viking ship that was still on land sits underneath a mound that was built about a thousand years ago as a burial site for one of the leaders. They’re not really sure who the man is but they buried a Viking ship along with 13 horses and a few dogs. I think there were also a few people that were killed and thrown in there as well.
And finally, after visiting the Viking museum, we went to Egeskov Castle further south on the island. Unfortunately, the castle was closed and would not open for another two weeks but the surrounding museums were all open with the private collections of the owner’s interests. This included practically every single vintage car, motorcycle, moped or anything else that travels. He had pretty much every fire truck you could imagine, had quite a few airplanes and helicopters and even had a camping museum. It was a very random place but really cool to see the only castle that is completely built from the water as the walls of the castle rise from the moat around it. This is the only castle of its kind in Denmark.
Afterwards, we visited another nearby castle. However, the place looked completely abandoned and we walked through the outer parts of it. We later found out that it’s an event space and can house a few hundred visitors when it’s open. When we were there it was eerily quiet.
We spent two full days in Odense so it was time to go back to Zealand, the main island which houses Copenhagen. We would travel by car to a town called Soro which was about 45 minutes away from Odense. However, we first stopped on the coastline before we drove over the famous bridge to take a walk along the sea and get a view of the bridge in the hazy distance. After this walk, we decided to go over the bridge and head directly south to take another much longer hike about four and a half miles looping mostly along the coast. It was nice to get out into nature and see some of the country and the weather treated us beautifully. However, it is quite cold in Denmark even at this time and we had to make sure we had layers for most of the trip.
In the evening, we arrived in Soro and checked into our bed and breakfast where we met a very lovely hostess who sat and talked with us for about an hour and a half while she ate her dinner. We talked about American politics and some of the intricacies of Danish culture. We would go out to dinner in the town of Soro and then take a stroll up to the cathedral and walk around a university that was built right on the water there dating back hundreds of years. When we left Soro the next morning we would head to the sea town of Roskilde. First, we would travel further north to the Frederiksborg castle, which houses every single portrait of the monarchs you would ever want to see and more. This massive castle is about 45 minutes north of Copenhagen. We drove the long way through the fjords so we had a nice scenic drive on the way up. We didn’t learn much at the Frederiksberg castle as the portraits just told us who the people were. But the grounds were also extensive and beautiful.
We then went to another Viking museum in Roskilde where we could see a few ships that had been sunk by the Vikings for defense in the port back a thousand years ago. Archaeologists had taken these ships out very carefully and reconstructed them on land; they recovered tens of thousands of pieces of wood and put them now in the museum sitting directly on the port. You can see a theme that most of our learning was either about Vikings or the royal family. The Danish really loved their royal family.
In the evening we actually had a home-cooked meal. As we had access to a kitchen and we were getting a little bit sick of eating out and the Danish prices as this has to be one of the most expensive countries in the world. Finally after touring the countryside for six days we would head to Copenhagen and drop the manual car off. And leave it behind for public transportation and walking instead on our first day of Copenhagen. We would get there in the afternoon after visiting the cathedral in Roskilde. The cathedral acts as the tomb of all of the royals and it was very interesting to see how extensive they worked to make sure that people remember them for centuries.
When we arrived in Copenhagen, we took a guided walking tour using an app of all the biggest sites in the center of the city. However, just the day before we got to Copenhagen, there had been a major fire at the Stock Exchange, which would be one of the sites on our tour. This has been compared to the Notre Dame fire in Paris and the damage has been extensive. There were many people that were lining the streets and coming up to see the damage. The police and military had roped off a large part of the center of the city and it was not accessible anymore. Fire trucks were still sitting all around the building.
After about two hours we would finish our walking tour and then head back to the hotel bar for some relaxation time. We had been averaging going to at least two museums per day and we were a little bit out of steam from learning so much information and seeing so many artifacts. We would go out for a nice evening walk into the fancier part of town after dinner. On our last full day in Denmark, we started by going to the Planetarium. In the last few years, I have grown very interested in astrophotography and learning about outer space. We spent about an hour in the exhibition learning about the stars, nebulae and supernovas. And then we went to the giant screen where we watched a film about the micro world.
Once we finished there, we went to the Rosenberg castle right in the heart of Copenhagen. This is the location of the crown jewels and a prominent event space throughout most of the history of the country. It was built back in the early 1600s. I write most of this blog seated in the park overlooking the Rosenberg castle as we’ve had some downtime.
In the final 24 hours from our trip in Denmark, we went on a boat ride around the harbor and the canals of Copenhagen and interestingly enough, right as we started our trip, the tour guide informed us that just 30 minutes ago a wall of the Stock Exchange had collapsed and the fire had reignited. This was breaking news and we were unsure if we were going to be able to go on the same route that was planned for us. We learned about the major sites from Copenhagen, passing the little mermaid among other famous buildings and statues, but eventually we came upon the Stock Exchange. While we couldn’t see the fire, the smoke and the smell were evident that something had happened. We were still allowed to pass right by. We finished the boat tour and went across the bridge to an outdoor market for some dinner.
On our final day in Copenhagen, it was quite rainy so we first went to the ruins underneath the Christiansburg Castle where the seat of power had lived for centuries just next to where the Stock Exchange was still on fire. The oldest ruins date back to the 12th century and quite a few castles have famously been erected and burned down since this time. We then went to the Copenhagen Town Hall for a guided tour. The building looks hundreds of years old however the architect paid close attention to how buildings were constructed and mimicked the style to build this town hall which for Copenhagen only 100 years old is quite new.
And finally we went to the Round Tower to get an eagle-eye view of the city before we would head to the airport and finish our trip. Our time in Copenhagen was filled with learning about Vikings, the royal family, seeing many castles and driving the countryside in a manual car. Neither of us knew much of anything about Danish culture before this trip. For the next week, I’ll be able to distinguish between what each Fredrick and Christian in the monarchy has done. We are now up to Fredrick X.