Author: Anne Fox

No not quite… but Parken is the Danish equivalent of Wembly and that’s where the WHOLE of Mia’s school is going next Thursday after winning the semi-final of the girls national football championship. The picture (from Denmark’s leading red top, number 15 in the series) shows Mia totally enraptured by the skill displayed by her team! We are delighted that the school is willing and able to drop everything for a day in this spontaneous fashion. The only down side is that Mia has to be at school by 7.30 am in order to get the bus to get the ferry to be at Parken in time for the 13:00 kick-off. Of course the boys get top billing with a 17:00 kick-off. The organisers, Ekstra Bladet and The Voice, have also persuaded some top ranked Danish popstars to enliven the scene between matches.

 Last weekend Gwen and Mia were on the Jens Krogh sailing ship with the scouts learning how to sail it. You can see the route on the map here. They were sailing up and down the fjord where Aalborg is. The yellow part of the route is that part which Mia navigated using the ship’s wheel of course. (Click the image to enlarge) The weather was fine. The vessel has taken part in the Tall Ships Race previously.

Facebook status updates: Just got home from a mega cool sailing trip but I’m mega tired!

Great, great, great! To be out and sailing on Jens Krogh. But there’s now a huge pile of homework to be done…

Tony was desperate to catch house martins before they migrate for the winter and only had one volunteer when he needed two. So Anne stepped into the breech and participated in her first bird ringing session ever!

This involved placing a fine mesh net in front of their nests under the eaves at twilight when they had just gone to bed for the night and making a racket. The racket frightened them out of their nests and into the nets. So Anne held one of the poles, Henning Ettrup the other while Tony got the birds out of the net.

That was the easy bit and the quick bit. Afterwards the birds were ringed and measured and Tony was trying to get blood samples; not easy with a bird which weighs on average 18 grams. In the end over 30 birds were ringed and we didn’t get back home until well after midnight!

 We are not the only ones who go on our summer hols! Choccie also seems to do this at around about the same time as we go on holiday. This year she left a few days after us and was still away when we returned from Wales. She retuned for one day only about a week after us and then was gone again.

I was beginning to feel guilty about not making any efforts to find her so I finally got around to phoning the national lost cat service on Tuesday 16th August. I had only put the phone down for five minutes when I heard an almighty crash in our bedroom, which is off limits to cats. When I opened the door, who should saunter in but Choccie! So I had to phone the lost cat people almost immediately once more to tell them ‘Do you know what? She’s just turned up!’

And when Mia returned from school she told us another spooky fact – that last year Choccie returned on August 16th too!

Today we drove to the west coast of Denmark to visit the sand sculpture exhibition at Søndervig which was very impressive. I am still confused though about how the sand does not crumble and disappear in the rain! The exhibition lasts from June to October. I imagined that they rebuilt the sculptures every morning but of course they don’t.

It was always a gamble booking a ski-ing holiday at the end of April even though it was in Norway but Mia’s North American treat put paid to ski-ing in February so it was Easter or nothing. We went to a new resort specifically to guarantee, as much as we could, that there would be snow, so this time it was Trysil. The hotel had reluctantly booked us in when I made the arrangements in January, saying they were full at this major holiday time but there was scant evidence of that while we were there and we often dined or breakfasted alone. The food was excellent, including elk steaks which we cooked ourselves on a hot stone.

The slopes also were deserted (see photo above) which meant that there were no queues for the lifts. The snow was starting to disappear at an alarming rate though, in no small part due to the sunny weather we had the whole time. It was difficult to know what to wear. On the one hand you needed to be protected against falling but on the other it got extremely hot in full ski-wear. As the day wore on, the snow started to melt in places and get slushy and liquid. The next day the liquid had turned into ice patches, over which you have little control when you ski. There were also alarming grass patches starting to appear, out of which protruded the occasional rock. Another obstacle were the deep holes which were appearing in several places. Most of these were marked with sticks so it was easy to avoid them but some of them weren’t and so I was afraid of up-ending although that never happened. For the first time since we started to go ski-ing 5 or 6 years ago we started to explore ski-trails but that also proved a challenge as the snow literally ran out in some places meaning that we had to walk painfully back up the slope on our skis. Gwen and I even tried a chair lift for the first time. We could see that you were scooped on to it by just standing in front of the oncoming seat but we weren’t sure about how to get off at the other end! Unfortunately we were too slow to react when we realised you had to ski gracefully off and both of us ended up with our skis in the air getting wet backsides when we got off. But there were so few people taking the chairlift that we had loads of time to recover our dignity before the next passengers got off.

The video below was taken whilst being pulled up to the top of one of the slopes. The main points of interest are the empty vistas, the blue skies and the empty bits in the snow to show how close to the end of the season we were. On the last day we had to get up at 4 am to catch a bus at 5 am to take us to the airport. Unfortunately the plane was late so we could have stayed in bed a little longer. We even got offered money to take an even later plane but as Tony was already well on his way to meet us at the airport and as it was school the next day everyone wanted to get home so we declined!

Below is a slideshow of some of the pictures which we took during Mia’s trip to New York and Canada 9-23rd February.

The itinerary was as follows:
Feb 9: Late domestic flight meant we missed our plane to Zurich so we got re-booked onto a direct SAS flight. Thanks goodness we didn’t start on Ryanair!

Feb 10-11: Explore New York on foot and by bus. Found Little Italy and Chinatown and walked half way across Brooklyn Bridge. Found Macy’s and Bloomingdales.

Feb 12: Fly to Toronto

Feb 13: Day trip to Niagara Falls

Feb 14: Fly to Quebec

Feb 15: Tour the Hotel de Glace and sleep the night there

Feb 16: Dog sled tour

Feb 17: Fly back to New York

Feb 18: Visit the Unsworths in New Jersey

Feb 19: Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island

Feb 20: Boat trip around the tip of Manhattan as far as the UN building; helicopter tour of Manhattan followed by pizza at Grimaldi’s in Brooklyn

Feb 21: Rockefeller centre followed by Metropolitan Museum, Lady Gaga gig at Madison Square Gardens.

Feb 22: Last minute shopping and start flight home

Feb 23: Home again!

The Videos
Niagara Falls

Dog Sledding

Helicopter over Manhattan

Helicopter touchdown

This month Tony has mainly been trying lino printing.

The Nativity 2010