Tag Archives: Denmark

An un-electrifying trip to Ribe

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Ribe was the far point in our planned trip through the Danish countryside, almost 300 kilometers from Copenhagen. But our goal was to see some of the Danish countryside outside of Copenhagen, and Ribe was worth the effort to get there. At well over a thousand years of inhabitation, Ribe is the oldest settlement in all of Scandinavia. It’s also lovely, as is the countryside along the route. The clouds were magnificent, and so was the pristine farmland with nary an electric line in sight. Approaching Ribe, we got a sense of the delightful experience that awaited us.

But we were feeling frazzled and stressed, or at least I was. Why? It involved an electric car we rented from Hertz that had a fairly short range. “Don’t worry, they’ve got electric chargers at almost every gas station,” said the rental agent at the counter in Copenhagen. “You can just use your credit card.”

I’ll be as brief as I can in summarizing the woes of this car. Enough to say that your credit card will be denied unless you’ve downloaded an app for that charger (and maybe even if you do have the app). That there are many brands of chargers, and each requires a different app. That you cannot download the app “on the fly” unless you have internet on your phone. That I do not have internet on my phone while traveling abroad. And that although the chargers exist at many gas stations, they are not affiliated with the stations, and the attendants know nothing about them and can’t help. Fortunately, the very nice Danish customers at other chargers nearby will help, and after two painful charging experiences, we arrived in Ribe. There, we were completely unable to charge our albatross car at three separate charging locations.

But this blog post is not about that. It’s about the charming town of Ribe and the curative properties of the magical Wadden Sea.

Ribe has been inhabited for some 1,600 years. I think it’s safe to say that none of the houses we saw this month has survived since that time. But still, the town changes slowly. Here are two pictures of the same spot ninety years apart.

Some of the houses do show their age and look to be, well, maybe three or four hundred years old. Maybe more. They seem right for a town that’s as proud of its long history as Ribe is. All in all, the effect is unmitigated charm.

The residents are welcoming. Open gates lead to charming inner courtyards. For example, the Bladt-Hansen family welcomes visitors to their backyard, with a view over the gardens. A café and shop in the same structure face the street. Here’s a link to read about their house and its history. On this page, you can also see the commercial side of the property, and how they have restored it to a look similar to the one it might have had when it was built–over five hundred years ago.

Thank you, dear family, for giving us a peek inside!

Fortunately, the friendly hotelier in the lovely Kammerslusen Hotel outside of Ribe allowed us to hook our electric albatrossvehicle up to an outdoor electric outlet.

I’d like to add here that, in addition to a sparklingly clean room with a view of the river Ribe Å, the Kammerslusen also offers an excellent dinner menu and great Danish hospitality. Surprisingly (to us, anyway), it’s not within walking distance of the town, an attribute we generally look for. Instead, it’s located well withing the Wadden Sea National Park, a large nature preserve of marshes and tidal flats that borders (and extends into) the North Sea.

We climbed the protective dike along the coastal marshlands and got a close look at the lock at the mouth of the river. I gained a whole new respect this day for the sheer beauty of this seaside terrain.

The next day, we knew with certainty what we had to do. Thanks to the Kammerslusen, we had enough charge to get to a Hertz counter, where we traded in the car for a car whose fuel we could pay for with credit card or with cash.

The most charming island

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It’s a lovely island. Enchanting, beautiful, windswept, and enduring all at once.

Its name is only three letters long, and apparently I can’t pronounce even one of them correctly. It’s spelled Ærø. To my ear, that sounds a lot like “Air-rue” [with the “r” trilled slightly]. But try as I may, I can’t seem to tell about it to anyone who actually lives in Denmark. The conversations go like this:

Me: “We visited this really great island. We liked it a lot.”

Danish person: “Oh? What island is that?”

Me: “Ærø.”

Danish person (with a squinty-eyed, puzzled look): “Uh… where?”

Me: “Maybe I’m not pronouncing it right. It’s spelled with that letter that looks like an A and an E combined, then R, then an O with a slash through it.”

Danish person (with a broad smile of recognition): “Ah… Ærø!”

They pronounce the island’s name in a way that sounds to my American ears exactly, but exactly, like the way I pronounced it.

My linguistic failures notwithstanding, I loved the name with its alluringly foreign letters. And I loved the island even more. Its soul is sailing the seas, and its heart is on the land.

Seafaring is particularly evident in Marstal, the largest town on Ærø, from the building of large wooden ships to the small details on the buildings.

The ferry from the mainland town of Svendborg arrives in Ærøskøbing, a delightful town of cobbled streets and colorful houses.

Everywhere, there are hollyhocks and roses, and many of the windows seem to be made for passers-by to look in as well as homeowners to look out.

Outside of the towns, the island has its beauty as well. Sea and sky and land come together very harmoniously on Ærø.

How we planned our Baltic trip

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When Dan and I talk about our recent (June, 2018) trip to the Baltic region, mentioning all the cities we visited, invariably someone asks, “Were you on a cruise?”

No. We were not on a cruise. Let me dispel that idea here and now, once and for all. We are not cruise people. We might become cruise people one day, when we can’t get around by ourselves very well any more or suddenly transform into extroverts–but not now. Nor were we planning, originally, to make our trip look like a cruise trip. It just sort of . . . happened.

It all started as a trip to Helsinki, a city Dan wanted to visit because of its reputation as a center of clean, modern design and the home of the famous architect Alvar Aalto. We thought we might go there over midsummer, knowing that there are fun celebrations in Finland at that time. And besides, Helsinki isn’t that far from St. Petersburg, a city I’ve long wanted to visit. That simply, we had the beginning of a plan: Helsinki and St. Petersburg over midsummer.

First, we investigated airfare to and from the region. We like nonstop flights, but it wasn’t a surprise to discover that there are no nonstop flights from San Francisco to Helsinki–much less to St. Petersburg. The closest we could get nonstop was Copenhagen, another city we’d hoped one day to visit. So, we added Copenhagen to our list of vacation destinations.

At this point, with three cities in the plan and an estimated timeframe of about two weeks in late June, we encountered our first problem: the World Cup in soccer was to be held in Russia at that time, starting on June 15th. And a friend had a horror story of being bumped from his confirmed and prepaid stay in a St. Petersburg hotel when there was some tourist event in town and the hotels could get more money. So–sorry, they “lost” his reservation. They found him a place to stay miles outside of the city–the best they said they could do. To avoid a similar problem during the World Cup, we decided to stay in an American chain hotel where Dan had a preferred traveler relationship. And, to be safe, we also decided to move our trip earlier than we’d thought–timing it to be leaving St. Petersburg just before the World Cup began. This decision anchored the start date of the trip. The end date was anchored by our desire to be in Helsinki for midsummer, and then spend a few days in Copenhagen.

Getting directly to St. Petersburg, it turned out, involved many hours of travel, and considerable expense–at least on the dates we had narrowed down to. We found that we could travel more easily–and with less stress–by breaking the outbound part of the trip up in Helsinki, spending an overnight in a real bed at a hotel airport, and then flying to St. Petersburg the next morning on a different airline. Thus, the plane reservation: outbound to Helsinki on June 7, 2018 via SAS Airlines, return from Copenhagen on June 26th. With an arrival in Helsinki on June 8th, we were able to reserve a hotel room at the airport, allowing time to decompress from the long flight, and fly to St. Petersburg the next day on Finnair, with a flight from Helsinki to Copenhagen on Finnair toward the end of the trip.

We now had a trip framework in place. It was time to figure out where we were going between June 9th and June 23rd (and how we were going to get there). And, of course, to make the necessary hotel reservations.

Four days in St. Petersburg seemed about right, and it would get us out of Russia two days before the World Cup started. Between that and the now-fixed departure to Copenhagen on the 23rd, we had ten days to spend in the Baltic. We knew we had to be in Helsinki last, but how many days would we want to spend there?

Research into “what to do in Helsinki” suggested that four days would be plenty, assuming we didn’t want to travel north into the Finnish countryside. But, interestingly, a side trip to the city of Tallinn, Estonia, via a relatively short two-hour ferry ride, was widely, and highly, recommended. It took only a few photos of the World Heritage medieval old city, and I was on board. But no need for an afternoon excursion: we had the luxury of spending a couple of days.

Given the frequent ferry connection between the two cities, we could potentially do them in either order. I decided to let the ease and cost of getting there from St. Petersburg enter into the decision process — and discovered almost by accident that the easiest and least expensive flight out of St. Petersburg was to . . . Riga, Latvia.

Well, why not! It seemed we had the time, and it wasn’t like we were likely ever to get another chance to visit. And besides, Riga, it turns out, also has a World Heritage medieval city center. And it’s fairly easy to get from Riga to Tallinn by land, giving us a chance to see some of the Baltic countryside.

A little research into travel methods, even more research into hotels, and the framework of the trip now looked like this:

A few notes of importance for anyone planning a trip such as this:

St. Petersburg
  • Traveling from the USA, as of this writing, you need a visa to get into Russia (and, even more important, to get out again). Allow plenty of time for this, as it’s a real process. The website  https://waytorussia.net/RussianVisa/ contains a good step-by-step guide.
  • The Renaissance Hotel is expensive; however, we were able to use Marriott points.
  • Buy your Hermitage tickets in advance, and avoid the lines! See https://www.hermitageshop.org/tickets/.
Riga
  • We did not like the Redstone Boutique Hotel, and do not recommend it. The two really good features were that the rooms were spacious and nicely furnished; and the staff was as helpful and friendly as you might wish. However, it was very hot in Riga when we were there, and the air conditioning did not work in some of the rooms, was marginal in others, and in any case was shut off centrally around midnight. The hotel was in a very loud location. And, to make matters worse, the management allowed parties on the roof until after midnight, with concommitant noise of loud party-goers coming and going, easily audible in the hallways and rooms. A word to the wise: Try someplace else.
  • We found the World Heritage medieval city center a bit touristy, with a lot of bars and restaurants and souvenir shops. And the building stock had a lot of infill of later eras. But it was nice enough.
  • We were completely surprised by a huge Art Nouveau district with some totally amazing buildings. For this alone, Riga is worth a visit. If I were to go back, I would try to stay in this area.
  • There’s also a lovely park ringing the old medieval city.
Tallinn
  • The Three Sisters Boutique Hotel is fabulous, and very well located just inside the city walls of the medieval city. It comprises three centuries-old buildings, totally renovated.
  • The medieval city center is very well preserved and full of interesting shops and other sights.
  • There is an up-and-coming artsy district called Kalamaja just a short walk from the old city that is definitely worth a visit.
Helsinki
  • Hotel F6 also turned out to be a good choice; the location was excellent, as was the hotel itself.
  • The so-called “Design District” was disappointing. There weren’t a lot of design-oriented shops or ateliers compared to just regular cityscape.
  • The just-regular cityscape is quite nice.
  • It turns out I don’t care much for Alvar Aalto’s architecture, though his bent-wood chairs are kind of cool.
  • There’s a great underground church in Helsinki, worth a visit. They charge you to get in, but don’t provide bathrooms for the public. Plan ahead!
  • Oh–and most important–in Finland, they do not necessarily celebrate midsummer at, well, midsummer. They celebrate it on the first Saturday afterwards. We left that afternoon, and missed the bonfires there. But another word of advice: They also do not necessarily celebrate midsummer in Helsinki. Everyone closes up early and heads to the north, to the woods. So we would probably have missed the bonfires in any case. Who knew!
Copenhagen
  • It turns out that in Denmark, they also celebrate midsummer on the first Saturday after midsummer, and they’re not shy about doing it in the city. So we arrived just in time!
  • We’d reserved a (relatively) inexpensive room on the back side of the hotel, but a room was available facing the harbor, and since (by chance) the Copenhagen midsummer celebration was to be held right there, we splurged and upgraded. And it was worth it.
  • A word about money: Copenhagen is expensive. Plan on it. Capuccino and a croissant for breakfast in a simple neighborhood bakery/cafe can run you $8 to $10.
  • The design scene in Copenhagen is wonderful. I still wish we’d bought the sheets and duvets. And the furniture is simple and beautiful.
  • There’s a neighborhood called Nørrebro that’s a little off the beaten track and worth a visit. It has edgy, unusual shops; a beautiful park-like cemetery; the old Jewish cemetery; and a vibrant, interesting Moslem immigrant neighborhood. I mention this, because your guide book might not.

That’s about it for trip planning. I’ll also be posting some pictures and commentary on various sights from time to time. If you’re thinking of planning your own trip, I hope you find this information useful — and feel free to contact me, should you have further questions. And have a great trip!