Peckish Travels

To further explore the Solrød area where we find ourselves, Bob and I headed out for a 45 minute walk on some of the many paved trails to explore Karlstrup Kalkgrav, a lake formed in an old limestone quarry that our homeowner had mentioned to us. It rained off and on during the walk there, while we were there, and part of the way back into town. However, it’s sunny and lovely now.

As we left the neighborhood, I captured (photographically) one of the many slugs that also populate this area. Probably shouldn’t be surprised as they like moist habitats.

Also on the edge of our neighborhood are some obstacle courses on a hillside. There isn’t a school right next to them, so we assume that these are for any children to use.

Then we we continued on the divided path out of the ‘hood.

On our way, we walked by some pretty wildflowers as well as a small outdoor sculpture between a business called OJD (automotive headquarters) and what appears to be an associated (or just named after them) art gallery. We need to see if this is something that we can visit.

The Karlstrup Kalkgrav is now a recreational nature area that allows for swimming, fishing (with a license), and camping. For many years, limestone was quarried on site, and you can see the limestone cliffs that surround the lake. There is a path that we walked around the very clear lake.

Our homeowner said that it is a popular swimming hole for local teens. No swimmers today, but we did see others on the path either walking their dogs or out with family/friends.

Bob and I took the train from the Jersie station in Solrød for a short, 3 stop ride to Køge (pronounced coo). Køge is an old medieval town south of Solrød on the Køge Bay. It is the principal town and seat of Køge municipality, and the urban area has a population of about 39,000.

Bob and I went to do a walking tour of the old town that we had picked up in the tourist office in Copenhagen. It was a great walkabout through a lovely town on one of the nicest days we’ve had here.

Bob and I have begun our housesit for the imposing but sweet Kobe after having had a great walk through with our young family homeowners, who are off to the US for a family visit with the husband’s family, a short cruise from California to Mexico and back, and a trip to Las Vegas. A great way to celebrate the wife’s 40th birthday!

Kobe is a 3 year old German Shepherd (female) named after Kobe Bryant. She is a mostly calm girl except when meeting new people and/or dogs she’s not fond of. She likes to be near her people either playing ball in the yard or lying on one of her beds.

In terms of our new location, we are loving the super clean Solrød Strand (known as Solrød) with all of its neighborhood paths (usually a separate walkway and bikeway side-by-side but divided. Our current house is in a small subdivision near the daughter’s school and about a 20 minute walk into the town center with multiple grocery and retail options as well as hair salons, one of the two local train stations, and municipal buildings.

In addition to all of that, Solrød lies on the Koge Bay, so has a beach as well as a marshy inlet. We went to check out those areas today as well as do a small shop at the Netto grocery in Solrød Center.

Bob and I spent the US Independence Day and the UK Election Day exploring the Black Diamond Royal Public Library before taking an S train (as opposed to a regional train) about 30 minutes out to the town of Solrød for a walk through with our homeowners for our housesit that begins tomorrow.

The Royal Danish Library is located on Søren Kierkegaard Plaza and is located in 3 very different buildings. Facing the water is the Black Diamond, designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects in 1999, in the center of which is Preben Hanson’s narrow extension built in 1968. At the back is H. J. Holm’s historical library building from 1906.

From the library we walk to the Nørreport station to catch our train to Solrød, where we had a great walk through with our homeowners and their 6 year old daughter and German Shepherd. The husband will pick us up at 7 tomorrow at the hotel to bring us to the house.

When we got back to the hotel, we went up to the walkway between the two towers on the 23rd floor to see the views.

See prior blog for today. The following photos are from Bob and my short excursion to Malmo, Sweden, today. Malmo is the 3rd largest city in Sweden with a municipal population of approximately 360,000. It struck us as one of the cleanest cities we have ever visited.

Bob and I had a great day today exploring the waterfront area of Copenhagen by boat, and then taking a 40-minute train ride over the Oresund Bridge to Malmo, Sweden. We ended with a drink at the Nimb Hotel on the grounds of Tivoli Park, which we had seen promoted (both the hotel and park) on an international hotel show that we saw while in the UK.

Due to the amount of photos, I’m going to break today’s activities into 2 blogs — one for Copenhagen and one for Malmo.

The Copenhagen waterfront is active with pedestrians and bicyclists on the 13k hiking/biking trail and people enjoying the water in kayaks, small rental boats, harbor taxis, and tourist boats like what we rode in today. During our 1 hour tour, along with the cultural and military sights, we also saw a boat that picked up trash, a lifeguard boat as well, lots of moored houseboats as well as some floating houses, and a couple of swimmers.

First, a few fun facts about Copenhagen. The city has a population of about 700,000, with a population of 1.4 million in the greater urban area. It has 250 miles of bike lanes, and is the capital of Denmark (or Danmark to the Danes).

Today, we headed to the geographic center of the city center but a bit north of the main tourist spots. We had an easy 25 minute commute, 5 minutes by foot to the Bella Center stop on the M1 line, and then 17 minutes to the Nørreport stop. We saw a number of beautiful park areas today, other museums, toured the Denmark Design Museum and then walked through the governmental plaza to the Kongens Nytorv metro for the ride back to the hotel. Had some mist off and on, but not too bad.

Our first park visit was to Ørsted Park, a cute city park that was built on a section of the large fortification ring that was constructed around Copenhagen in the 17th century. It has a lovely lake, meandering walking paths, and a number of bronze statues.

From Orsted Park we walked to the Botanical Garden, much of which, unfortunately, was undergoing maintenance. But it was still lovely. On the way, we got a unique big head photo for Bob.

After walking through what was open of the Botanical Garden, we walked farther along the road to Østre Anlæg Park, with a couple more museums and more gardens and ponds.

We then walked to the Kastellet (citadel), a lovely star-shaped fortress built in the 17th century as part of the larger fortification ring around Copenhagen. It now contains a number of memorials as well as a windmill.

The Design Museum was just a short walk away, and we decided to pay to visit. We were not alone. It was popular today. In addition to the regular visits, the museum had special exhibits on Japanese screen printing, futuristic designs, and a man who has created his version of outfits representing different areas of Denmark.

The museum noted that Danish Design became an international concept in 1949 after some American journalists visited the annual furniture exhibition of the Copenhagen Cabinetmaker’s Guild.

From the Design Museum, we continued down Bredgade Street, where we saw Frederick’s Church and then walked on to the Kongens Nytorv metro station.

Bob and I traveled from London Stansted Airport to Copenhagen today. Unexpectedly, we had a better experience with Ryan Air than with the airport in general. We had expected our bags to be overweight for Ryan Air, and they were not, so that made us happy as we didn’t have to pay extra money. We also thought there would be quite the queue for the bag dump, but all went well.

We started having (admittedly first world) issues after making our very long way through the duty free shops. I had wanted to buy one last UK newspaper, but by 8 am any shop that sold newspapers were sold out, and quite honestly the stores looked like quite a mess. More importantly, however, we are currently unable to use international data roaming, so are reliant on Wi-Fi, and the wifi at the airport was terrible. So we felt very old school and out of touch for our time at Stansted and were happy to leave it behind when our flight left.

We left London about 40 minutes late, but made up time in the air and arrived in Copenhagen only 15 minutes late. We had a quick trip through Immigration— only asked about length of stay — and absolutely nothing to do for customs.

After picking up our baggage, we headed towards the metro, where we bought and put a balance on a couple of train cards, as we will be using the metro and trains frequently while here.

We took the metro from the airport 7 stops, where we changed to another line for a 4 stop ride to where we got off to walk a few blocks to the AC Hotel. This hotel is connected to a convention center and is south of the downtown core of Copenhagen.

After getting settled in the room, we left to check out a bit of the surrounding area. Much of it seems new, but we did find some cute small groceries and walked through an older housing area across a couple of canals from our hotel.

We’re looking forward to getting into the city center tomorrow.

Bob and I left Bury St Edmunds today after seeing the happy return of our homeowners from their driving trip through Norway. Angus and Mollie were quite excited to see them. Our homeowner kindly offered to drive us to the train station as it was raining.

We then caught the bus replacement service to Ely, due to work being conducted on the rail line, where we had a short wait for an initially very busy train to London Stansted Airport via Cambridge and Audley End.

We are spending the night at the Hampton Inn next to the airport as we have an early morning flight tomorrow to Copenhagen. We’ll be flying Ryan Air for the first time, so are expecting to have to pay more for our bags as their weight limit is a little lower than other airlines.

We walked back to the airport to pick up dinner before the start of the England game in the Eurocup, and both the airport and hotel seem quite busy.

Bob and I took our 3rd trip east today on the East Anglia train in the direction of Ipswich. The first time, we went to Ipswich, the 2nd time we went to Needham Market (stop just before Ipswich), and today, we visited Stowmarket (the stop before Needham Market). It was a quick 20 minute ride.

Just as a random aside, I liked this quick journey because there were only two stops before Stowmarket, and I remember them because I seem to have immediately associated them with other words. The first stop out of Bury is Thurston (Howell III from Gilligan’s Island TV show), and the second stop is (Alls well that) Elmswell. This is the kind of stuff that amuses my brain, and don’t even get me started on the town of Diss. I can solo laugh for quite awhile with that one.

Anyhoo, back to Stowmarket. As we noted during our trip to Ipswich, there is a 17 mile trail that connects Ipswich and Stowmarket and that runs along the River Gipping. As we did in Ipswich, we started our visit to Stowmarket with a short walk along the trail. While the path was fairly clear right in town, it was very narrow and surrounded by tall grasses as we left the town center.

Stowmarket is a market town with a population of approximately 21,000. Unbeknownst to us it was one of their biweekly market days today, the other being Saturday. There was a fairly active high street, and we enjoyed our walk around town.