My husband and I are traveling in New Zealand. With a limited time for the trip, we chose mostly to fly from one place to another within the country, but the opportunity to visit an area certified by the International Dark Sky Association was too good to resist.
Let me say by way of background that we owned a home on the north shore of Block Island, Rhode Island for many years. Twelve miles off the coast, we were able to see the stars. So many stars! The Milky Way, even. Nighttime was beautiful there. Some years ago, we moved to the West Coast of the USA and gave up this vacation home. In our suburban location, we are lucky, on a clear night, to see Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and maybe, just maybe a few of the brightest stars. We began to forget our lost nighttime sky.
Researching our trip, we learned that New Zealand has a number of dark-sky sanctuaries and reserves. One of them was located between Queenstown and Christchurch–and it was possible to stay the night. We reserved a car in Queenstown, to be returned the next day in Christchurch. And we reserved a “skybed” at Skyscape.
Yes, you are seeing correctly: This building is a single bedroom with a deck and a *glass roof* through which you can lie in bed and watch the sky grow dark and the stars blossom.
There were clouds, but only in places. In other places, the sky was clear and as civil twilight turned to nautical twilight and then to astronomical twilight, the stars came out in their millions.
The following day, after we drove to Christchurch and settled in there, I wanted to thank my husband for all his fearless and excellent driving–three hours from Queenstown to Skyscape, and then four hours to Christchurch, all of it on the “wrong” side of the road. I told him how much it meant to me to see the stars again, and to my surprise, I found myself in tears.
I had no idea how much the sight of the infinite universe means to me. How much we city-dwellers have lost.
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.
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!”
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.
Last night’s sunset was exquisite. The sun’s moving north, and it’s now setting between Sachem Pond and the North Light. Streaks of clouds added vividness and color.
The sun will also, alas, be setting sometime soon over our tenure in this wonderful location. We bought this unique piece of land the year my daughter was born; we built this house twenty-four years ago; and we have been coming here whenever we could ever since. We love this place, and it will always be close to our hearts.
I hope whoever buys this wonderful home will find that it is a home not just for your visits and your things but also for your heart and for some deep place that defines who you are.
Dan and I are back on Block Island this weekend, where the weather is crisp and fresh, cool and sunny. And so I interrupt this torrent of blogging about our trip to India to bring you last night’s beautiful sunset on Block Island, Rhode Island, taken, as usual, from the deck of our home here.
We are truly blessed with a wonderful location with ocean and pond views all around at the very northern edge of the island.
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a Block Island sky scene in this blog. Time to remedy that. We’re back on the island after more than three months away. The autumn equinox is almost two weeks past, so the sun is setting and rising a little bit south of due west and east. That means the sun is now setting over Sachem Pond again.
September 2, 2013
And it’s rising over the woods and bushes east of the house.
September 3, 2013
But the real sun show of the day yesterday was neither the sunset nor the sunrise. It was a fortunate late-afternoon confluence of clouds and sun that created a bright sundog.
It’s finally happened–a sunset so photogenic that I can’t winnow the photos down to just two or three. Yesterday evening it pretty much didn’t matter which vaguely southwesterly direction I was looking in or how far down the sun actually was or how much zoomed in the camera was–everything was perfect!
See what I mean? But I’ve narrowed it down to only six more, and so without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I present: December 5, 2012!
