25th April 2017. Trelleborg, Kalundborg and a fjord near Roskilde, Denmark.

We planned to travel to Trelleborg this morning to the National Museum of Denmark to see the Viking fortification.   We stopped at the services at Nyborg to empty and refill the van then we drove to the bridge to cross over to the next island.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when we got to the bridge it was extraordinarily long and to our astonishment when we were part way across we discovered there was an island midway that had been hidden from view!  Our tour has opened my eyes to the many feats of engineering throughout Europe.

 

I really enjoyed our journey across the bridge, it almost made up for the cost of the toll, 715 Danish Krone (an eye watering £83.50!  The conversion to pounds came as a bit of a shock because we’d converted it incorrectly, much cheaper, in our heads and didn’t realise the exact price until we were chatting about it whilst crossing the bridge!)

We were starting to remember how painful it was financially travelling round Norway so we were expecting the entrance fee to the National Museum of Denmark at Trelleborg to be very expensive too.  We were thrilled to discover that it was free!  What a wonderful surprise and it was really interesting.

We were well and truly wrapped up against the cold but it was still icy.  We wandered in and around the Viking Long House.  It was a very big building, a lot of hard work must have gone into creating it, the craftsmen who worked on the reconstruction must have felt a huge sense of pride when they saw the end result.

After we’d explored the Longhouse we braved the cold and walked out to the fortification, the wind was whistling past our ears as we stand on top of the ramparts but it was a wonderful sight to see.

On our way back we walked through a field dotted with sheep, as we reached the end of the path we waited while three Danish people came through the gate into the field and the man held the gate open for us to pass through, as we passed him he looked at us and said (with a straight face) “Do you know why you have to close the gate?” (I felt momentarily irritated assuming he thought we’d leave it open and let the sheep escape) after a brief pause he continued, “To keep out the draughts” then gave us a big grin as he wandered off chuckling to himself.  Darren and I both burst out laughing, that was the last thing we expected him to say, even while I’m writing about it his comment is making me smile.

I’m so in awe of someone brave enough to make a joke in a foreign language, as the German man also did in Elvas.  What made this joke even funnier was that although Darren, myself and the man were both chuckling away at his joke, the two women who were with him both rolled their eyes at each other and walked on ahead of him, perhaps they’ve heard too many of his jokes over the years!

As usual we hadn’t checked out what was at the museum so it was a very nice surprise to discover a Viking village to walk round and it was even better when we saw people dressed in Viking clothes cooking on a fire in one of the houses.

The museum was interesting to walk around.  There were Viking costumes to try on and laying on a chair was a chain mail vest and a Viking helmet.  I picked up the helmet which was heavy but the chain mail was so heavy I couldn’t lift it all off the chair, I can’t imagine how they used to go into battle wearing both the helmet and the chain mail AND carry a heavy shield and sword, how on earth did they manage to stand up let alone walk!

We enjoyed the museum so much that we stayed there far longer than we had intended.  From Trelleborg we drove up to Kalundborg so we could see the fancy church there, The Church Of Our Lady with its amazing towers, and see a bit more of this island.  I hadn’t realised it was so industrial in that part of the island but it was very interesting to see.

As usual we arrived in the town to find the roads were being dug up so we shot off on a detour which took us out of the town to a parking area beside a restaurant, the beach and some radio masts.

As we stepped out of the van we discovered that it was EXTREMELY cold by the sea.

We’d hoped to have lunch in the restaurant but it was full to bursting with customers, to the disappointment of our stomachs, instead we had a short walk along the beach and back through the little garden taking some swift photos of the church en route back to the van.

We left the car park with the intention of driving back into the town, parking and going to look at the church properly as that was our whole reason for coming this far but fate intervened, we encountered more road works which diverted us out of town so off we went on the next part of our journey to our stopover for the night beside a fjord near Roskilde.

During the journey it sleeted on us!  No wonder we had been feeling cold, mind you that’s an improvement on rain.

We hadn’t eaten since breakfast so we stopped at a little cafe 30 minutes from our destination where we had Danish open sandwiches and a cake ‘taste test’.

Yesterday we’d had a white version of a green cake we used to eat in Sweden and in the cafe they had both so we bought one of each.  They did have slightly different flavours, the white one was my favourite.

While we were standing at the counter a Danish man who was sitting at the table behind us asked whether we were on holiday.  We told him what we’d been doing and he told us that in the 1960’s he also travelled round Europe for a year then a few years later the travel bug caught him again and he went out to America to work for 2 years.  He said that he couldn’t speak English when he went out there but he learned pretty fast out of necessity.  He was very nice, he was very apologetic saying that his English wasn’t very good, I told him I thought it was superb.

He waved to us when he left and again as he passed the window on his way to his car.  We have met so many lovely people on this trip.

After our meal we drove to the fjord, unfortunately we couldn’t pull into the entrance because of road works so we had to carry on up the road until Darren could find somewhere to turn around so we would be on the same side of the road as the entrance to the car park.

When we finally got off the main road we became a little nervous, the road down to the car park was looking rather narrow, however Darren persevered and just round the corner it opened out to a large car park where we parked in a corner so we would be out of everyone’s way but could look out over the fjord .

We chose a popular spot to stop in and we watched people come and go.  We enjoyed watching a lady training her two collies, one of them was like Tigger …… bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun.  He couldn’t stay still for more than a second much to the frustration of his owner and her other dog.

 

In the evening as the sun started to set I put on a couple of coats and went and took some photos of the water.  It was very beautiful but SO SO cold.  I was absolutely frozen by the time I got back to the van, unfortunately I felt compelled to go back out a couple of times because the sunset looked so lovely.

Sod’s Law decrees that the road works that they had been doing quietly earlier became noisy ‘digging up the road’ road works as soon as the sun went down.  Luckily for us we were watching Castle with headphones on until quite late and they stopped the road works about half an hour later.