Phew – you had me alarmed for a minute there. We’ve already bought our tickets, and I was worried that I’d wasted bunches of money – but doing some poking around, the cheapest flight into Frankfurt instead of Copenhagen would have saved us US$2.00 per ticket.
Of course, that’s when I search for our particular travel time. When I search for the lowest fares regardless of dates, I find we could’ve saved $400+ per ticket.
Hmm. I think I’m going to pretend I never found that out. :eek:
Daniel
Are you familiar with Thermarest self-inflating pads? They are the bee’s knees and make the difference between well-rested and achey-all-over the next morning. In order to save space, you may wish to consider the half-length models. Some lightweight two season synthetic fiber sleeping bags plus a tarp that can be rigged as a tube tent and you are on your way.
You may wish to investigate a one-time-only refund on your airfare due to “war travel fears” or some such nonsense. Another $800.[sup]00[/sup] in your pocket could go a long way during the trip.
You do realize, of course, that we all expect you to check in from a Internet cafe over in Scandihoovia to let us know exactly just how much incredible fun you are having?
Hey, thanks, blinx! I’ll practice.
Two years ago my wife flew into Germany, and I went to Oslo, hooking up with her a week later. I got driven from Oslo (Viking Museum, Ski Jumps, sailing in the harbour) through Sweden to Denmark, then hopped on a train at the border and went to Frankfurt. Easy-peasy.
If you want to bike around, I really suggest doing it in Southern Denmark-- it’s flat, and basically you get on a road, bike 5 km (which even for an out-of-shape sod shouldn’t take you more than 45 minutes), hit a village, look around, grab a bite, then take one of the six roads out of the village and bike another 5 km to the next one. It’s rather neat.
Mostly when I went, I was looking for ancestral homes near Mogeltonder-- there are streets and factories named after relatives…
Another warning:
June is hightime for tourists in Scandinavia
Make sure that you book reserved seats on the trains, especially on the Oslo-Bergen route, or you may not get on board at all, and if you do, you may have to stand the whole way.
And good luck getting on the HurtigRute, that’s usually booked months in advance.
On another note, this only gives you more reason to try some of the more “non-touristy” off-the-beaten-path type activities.
I do recommend the hiking in the mountains suggestion above. It’s fun hiking from cabin to cabin, sharing places with strangers, meeting all kinds of people. Often there is food at the cabins and you just leave some money for what you use, works on the honor system.
Thanks all for the advice – I like the idea of biking around Denmark and hiking in the mountains. Now I’ve got a couple of more obscure questions:
Will chanterelles, hedgehogs, or other easily-identifiable mushrooms be in season? (I might even branch out into boletus edulis – from looking at Norwegian mushroom sites, it looks like Norway doesn’t contain poisonous boletes). What about wild berries? I love picking my own dinner, and if these things are around, I’ll keep my eyes open for them when we go hiking. But I couldn’t find their seasons on the Web.
Daniel
Yes!
While you are in Denmark, keep an eye out for extremely odd concrete domes at some major intersections in small towns and other places. These are Nazi machine gun pillboxes, leftover from the occupation. They have been preserved as a reminder of the war. Regular Wednesday air-raid siren tests are also common. Imagine Hitler’s fury when a next door nation of blonde haired and blue eyed Aryan people gave that street thug their collective finger.
Winston Churchill extolled the Danish resistance as “an example for any other country to follow, large or small.” Conscripted Danish laborers would pour precious sugar into the concrete they were mixing in order to ruin its crystallization properties. Imagine the sacrifice of dumping such a prized war time commodity into a batch of cement. Remember that Denmark was the only Nazi occupied nation allowed to fly its own flag (the oldest on earth) during the second world war.
One Danish town was ordered to turn over all of their Jews the very next day. In the morning, that entire city’s population presented themselves for deportation. I cannot possibly stress the pride I feel about my Danish heritage in light of these facts. One of my mother’s older relatives routinely smuggled Jews to neutral Sweden on his fishing boat. He seemed to openly collaborate with the Nazis in order to gain information for the underground. At all times he risked being killed by some young buck in the resistance movement who was trying to make his mark. I can still remember my mother being able to recite Hitler’s speechs from memory. When we were very young, she took us to see “Night and Fog” in order to imprint the Nazi horrors upon us.
Please do visit the Resistance Museum. You will gain a deeper insight into the Danish national character and discover yet another dimension of their wonderful country. I give special thanks to Zoe for bringing up the subject in this thread.
I’ll stop ranting now.
Do all the Danish men look like male models? Would this be a good reason to emigrate to a scandinavian country?
Thanks so much, everyone! Your suggestions are very helpful. Zenster, I love museums, so I definitely want to check out the Danish Resistance Museum. It sounds fascinating. And it’s good to know about the pizza in Denmark. Some of the strangest food I’ve ever had was at an American restaurant in Moscow.
Ivar, thanks for the tip about booking in advance. It’s something I’d been wondering about.
Well… no not all - I can think of atleast one exception.
Scandinavia is filled with surreally-gorgeous women as well as with people whom I kept mistaking for my cousins out of the corner of my eye…
I also recommend the Danish Resistance Museum. I found it by accident while walking through the city… and it was a very emotional experience for me. I went in and looked at the exhibits, and in the central cour of the building was a reconstruction of a concentration camp. When I saw the characteristic form of the concrete poles supporting the fencewires, it suddenly clicked: this had been real. For many North Americans, ‘the War’ was something we saw on grainy black-and-white historical footage from reruns of ‘The War Years’ on public televison. Actually being there in that museum, in that land… was a whole different thing.
Don’t go out drinking in Copenhagen with a guy named Magnus, you’ll wake in a bathtub full of ice and your kidneys removed.