258. Day 18: And finally, please take your partners for the Eurostar Villanelle …
What shall I bring back from this holiday:
Our tour round Northern Europe on the trains?
What memories for when I’m old and grey?
257. Days 16 and 17: Lübeck
Apparently many cities have a ‘Great Fire’ – often a few. Copenhagen’s first fire was in 1728 – usual reasons: wooden houses too close together, hot summer, straw bedding, strong wind to spread it and so on. The good burghers of Copenhagen, our guide told us, were determined that this wouldn’t happen again.
256. Day 15: You put your suitcase in, your suitcase out…
Copenhagen to Lübeck: four hours. We’d reserved window seats to enjoy the scenery. On the map, it looks as if we’re going quite close to the coast and at one point will need to cross what ActorLaddie tells me is the Baltic Sea. I’m intrigued how this is going to work: on the way to Copenhagen, we crossed some pretty spectacular bridges and also went through some fairly long tunnels. I wonder if it’ll be a combination of these or whether we’re going to all be asked to swim across dragging the train behind us. I hope it’s not the latter as it’s raining and I’d rather not get wet.
255. Day 14: A Copenhaiku
Copenhagen has
a very pretty harbour;
New Metro en train
254. Day 13: Copenhagen
I wasn’t intending to blog today but this is irresistible!
This afternoon we went to look around a home which has been preserved exactly as it was when decorated in 1886 for the fabulously wealthy silk merchant, Rudolph Christensen. He lived there with his wife and three children: a son and two daughters, Gerda and Ellen. Here are the children.
253 Day 12: Show me the way to go home / “To travel is to live.”
Or “What I have learnt today.”
1. That if you pay £32 for a room, you should not be surprised if said room is pretty much wall-to-wall bed with paper thin sheets and smells of student.
252. Day 11: Looking a little pail…
“You must do the Night Watchman’s walk,” said CallMeGeorge, our student waiter. “It starts just there at 8 o’clock and it’s free.” And so we did.
251. Day 10: Ribe
You’ll be relieved to hear that we managed to leave Hamburg with all limbs and digits intact. Close call though, I reckon.
Now, we’re a little baffled. We’ve been in Ribe for a whole day and no one has yet tried to explain to us how to work the toilet. There’s not even a manual!
249. Days 7 and 8: Dutch Courage.
So, Amsterdam.
We’ve been to Amsterdam once before, just for a daytrip when the children were children. We did a canal tour, we visited Anne Frank’s house and we wondered at the bicycles. I particularly remember being awestruck by someone carrying a double bass on a bike.
In my memory, Amsterdam was a charming place and I was looking forward to exploring it at a more leisurely pace.
248. Day 6: A little mouse with clogs on…
There’s an episode of Cabin Pressure – I am a bit obsessed with Cabin Pressure – where Douglas and Martin are trying to make the time pass quicker by taking turns to think of people who are not evil but have evil sounding names: Russell Crowe, Calista Flockhart, Heston Blumenthal.
To this list, we would like to add Hester Klute, the owner of our current AirBnB. Don’t you think she sounds evil?
The Jelly Chronicles 