Fishing Tour

The weather was perfect on this Sunday afternoon in late August. We took our neighbors Karsten, Natalie and Philipa to Dronningmølle, Philip's favorite boy-hood fishing hole. The girls caught 5 fish while Philip and Karsten tried their best. Philip had his maiden tour on 'the boat' and was able to steer it a little. I played photographer, fishing pole holder, hot chocolate pourer and biscuit fetcher. Enjoy! Click here for pics.

Anma's 31st Birthday Party

Well another year has passed and Anma has turned 31. Hard to believe, except if the sun shines on her hair and you catch a glimpse of some white hairs. Anyway, we threw a Mexican-themed party for Philip's family, complete with peach sangria, gazspacho soup, chicken enchiladas and sopaipillas. Everyone was stuffed and happy- just perfect!

Check out the pics here

Embrace the Journey – France 2007

June 25th, 2007: Espergærde, Denmark – Göttinge, Germany
The Baron, Rasmus’s grandfather, once said that you are not a true traveller if you can’t experience something on a S train from Copenhagen to Klampenborg. Anne-Marie proved herself as a traveller already on the first day. On the highway just 8 kilometres from home Anne-Marie giggled, when she saw two lamas making out on hill next to the road.

The trip through Denmark went fine and we rolled straight onto the ferry with out reservation – nice.

When we reached Germany we had 50 miles of small roads and then we hit the autobahn and from there on we cruised between 140-160 km/h. The left lane belonged to Mercedes, BMW and Audis. They were driving 200 km/h and more.

We have ended up in Göttinge, 100 km south of Hannover. It is a University city, so we had no problem finding a hotel. At night we went downtown to the oldest bar (1738) and got a solid German meal (Wiener schnitzel and Gnocchi) and a well deserved beer for the driver.

It has been a long travelling day and we have past lost of interesting places, but Anne-Marie just can’t stop talking about the lamas 8 kilometres from home. Maybe we should just camp out at the zoo next year.

Go to the web album.

Tuesday, June 26th, 2007: Göttinge, Gernmany – Mittelhausen France.
Today started like every other day with us waking up at 5:30 AM. But today was a special because this was the first real day of vacation, so I had a long snooze in the bath, so my finger tips looked like raisins when I finally got up. Anyway time for breakfast and then hit the road again.

BUT our car had something else in mind for that day. We started the car perfectly and then the dashboard said 1700 km to next service. You see you wouldn’t normally have a problem, but we are travelling 600km a day so 1700 km wasn’t really far away. Luckily we went past a Skoda dealer and he was able to service the car in 3 hours. We spent the time in a local bakery / café and besides drinking lots of coffee we also planned the next few days. The bakery was the local hang out for lots of different groups of people. There were a womens club and some old retires guys having a swell time charming the ladies.

The rest of the trip to Mittlehausen went fine with lots of sights like sunflower fields, vineyards etc. Mittelhausen is a quite little town with approx. 600 inhabitants. So Anma got her first taste of France. We had dinner at the hotel and I tried some of the local cuisine like pork terrine and sole on sourcraut. Anma had a filet on potatoes and crème brulé.

Go to the Alsace web album.

Wednesday, June 27th 2007: Mittelhausen – Strasbourg – Obernau – Mittelhausen

Today we went to Strasbourg. It rained as usual, but that didn’t stop us to walk around Petite France a picture perfect part of town. There a lot of water channels in Petite de France and wonderful buildings. We saw the cathedral, but didn’t manage to go in. There was a big sale on in town and we found a area where there were lots of clothing shops for children, so we made the first purchases for little Frederik: 2 small body stockings.

We went on to Obernau to stock up on brochures on the wine route. This evening is going to be used on planning the route in greater detail.

We tracked back on the small roads to Mittlehause: Ottrot – Boersch – Rosheim – Avolsheim.

Stopped in Rosheim to buy dinner and ate it in Avolsheim overlooking the river and a near by church (picture below).

We are still on the Alsace album folks.

Thursday, June 26th 2007: Mittelhausen – Obernau – Bernardwillers – Barr – Mittelbergheim – Dambach la Ville – Ribeauville.
What a day. We started out at the market in Obernau. Before the market it seemed like we waked the owners of the hotel at 7AM. They didn’t expect people that early at the breakfast buffet. Anyway at the market, which were all over town we bought boar, deer and donkey sausages, gruyere, Tomme de Jura, sweet melons and abricotes.

We drove to Bernardville, where I had my first winetasting. The wine growers are not really good in English so we got by with German and hand signs.

We ate lunch on the square of Hotel de Ville (town hall). We started and then it rained. Then we paked everything up and walked around a little. Came back to the square when it stop raining and packed the lunch out again and then it started raining again. We ended up in front of the old post office where there was room for two people without getting wet. The topic of the lunch was weather. We have opened the discussion on skipping out trip to the mountains and instead drive directly down to Søren in Hyere. We just want some sun.

We went on and came to Mittelbergheim a quaint little town. I had two wine tastings. One at family Schwob, where granddad didn’t let me spit out the wine. The second at Family Gilg, where the wine was superb.

Well Anma was the driver for now on because I got a little tipsy trying out all that fine wine. Next town was Dambach la Ville where we saw our first stork nest on one of the city entrance towers. But we thought we were privileged with this stork nest, but we had a lot more in stalled for us when we reached Ribeauville. Here we had a hotel in the heart of town and we got a table next to a house with a stork nest. So when the storks were chucking down frogs we watched whicle having dinner to. Not frog legs although that would have been appropriate.

Friday, June 29th, 2007: Riberville – Beaujeu (wrong town – right name) – Beaujeu – Lautignie
We decided to drive down to Søren in Hyere, because the weather has been misbehaving. But, we started out thinking that we would drive up to the castke on the hill only to find out that you can only walk up. So we decided to drive on to Beaujolais (1/2 way to Søren) instead of walking our legs off up the step hill to see some old castle ruins.

The only problem was that our GPS, Ibby, told us that there were 3 different Beaujeu’s in France. So I (Anma) just picked the first one. Unfortunately, as we found out from some nice Swedes, we were in the wrong town. Also there were no vineyards in sight, so they were probably right. After checking all our maps we picked the second Beaujeu and Ibby proclaimed that it was a 2.5 hours drive. Time was of the essence now. We were cutting it close, and the Tourist Office could be close when we reached town, which meant no help finding a vineyard B&B. But we made it and we wasn’t disappointed driving the extra distance. The hillsides were covered with small shrubs of Beaujolais grapes not more than 1 meters high. Bad backs must be a common problem in this region.

Still more to come.