Author: Anne Fox

Bornholm looks as though it should belong to Sweden but is in fact part of Denmark. Getting there is no easy task and just as long and expensive as going to any other European sunshine destination. We had to get up at 2.30 am to make the 8.00 am ferry which then took 6 hours to get to the island. Going home we took the ferry to Sweden and came back via the new (-ish) Øresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden.

Bornholm has the reputation of having good weather and while the mainland Danes were dealing with flooded cellars we got sunburnt, so that bit is true. The landscape is different mainly because of the underlying granite which is reminiscent of Brittany or Cornwall. It also makes for fantastic rock pools which we explored from day one. The whole island seems to have a preservation order on it and we were staying in an olde worlde town house in Svaneke one of the attractive harbour villages around the island.

The tourist experience here seems quite different to our part of Denmark for several reasons. There are lots of natural attractions such as Ekkodal, a valley in which you can hear your voice echo, Jonas Capel, a natural clifftop pulpit from which a mad Irish priest used to preach to the heathens on the beach below and several rocking stones, massive boulders left by melting glaciers and which you can rock by hand. Even the largest fortress in Northern Europe, Hammershus, is free of charge to visit.

There are of course paying attractions too and we visited about half of those. But there is also the cafe culture which means that if one restaurant is full you can just walk to the next one. Too trite to mention? Well I do remember some very long treks in search of a place to eat back here in Djursland. Once we had to give up in Ebeltoft and drive all the way to Grenaa. Another time, a favorite eating place was closed because the ovens weren’t working and one time we were the only diners in the only restaurant open in Grenaa on a winter’s Sunday night. So we certainly don’t take these things for granted. Plus Bornholm is supposed to be a very arty place so there are lots of interesting (and many not so interesting) little craft shops and exhibitions to go to.

Bornholm even has its own desert island, Christiansø¸, which has been a fortress and Denmark’s version of Robben Island.

Bornholm is where Gwen came on a school trip two years ago so she was our guide. Mia will be making the trip next year and is looking forward to it even more now that she has been once.

Of course not everything is olde worlde on the island and we did visit one harbour town where the highlight was the conversion of a grain silo on the harbour front into attractive holiday flats. We put our name down straight away! Apparently sales are quite slow.

The picture is a variation on old theme and shows Tony and the girls waiting to go and see one of the 4D movies at Legoland at which we were sprayed with dragon snot amongst other things. What was different about Legoland this year (apart from the re-designed 3D glasses) was that we went for two days and stayed at the hotel, a long time wish of Mia’s. The idea had originally been to do this with our Chinese guest but as she never came we did it alone. The weather was very hot and the queues very long but as hotel residents we were allowed early into the park the next morning and were able to enjoy a brief half hour of short queues before the rest of the public had made it to the back of the park where the best rides are.

The girls had a room overlooking the park and particularly appreciated the second flat screen TV positioned conveniently in the toilet.

The large adventure playground in which Adam used to get lost has disappeared to make way for a splash everybody in sight attraction.

The video below shows Gwen and Mia on one of their favorite rides.

This shows that you don’t need a snow storm to get stuck round here. Many people wonder how we can live without a tractor and at times like this so do we! You can also treat this as a Danish lesson. Try to work out what the different characters are saying. This occurred before we went on our recent trip to the UK by the way.

Luckily I had taken a photo of the arrangement which we liked in IKEA on my phone because when we returned the following week to make a definite order they had changed it all and we would have had to order it from memory. As it was, the saleswoman used the phone picture to make up the order and we had it delivered a week later in a ginormous lorry who had difficulty manoevring through our green lane. And then the fun began!

What is especially challenging is when a crucial screw is missing. They are so tailormade that you cannot just go out to the garage and take one from your own stores so it was another phone call to IKEA and we will get the missing items in the post. I expect it will be finished before the end of August.

We have had some good weather and the girls like nothing better than to eat outside. So here is Gwen among the poppies cooking on a Trangia a few weeks ago.

At the end of May Gwen went south to take part in the Danish championship for best scout team having won the regionals earlier in the month. After much orienteering, morse coding and first aiding her team won and are now the Danish champions for two years until the next championship. Of course this made the local papers with a very bad group photo in which no-one was recognisable.

Could these be the smallest origami cranes ever? Mia has a visiting Chinese lady at school who has been showing them how to do origami and now our house is infested with paper creatures. Mia just can’t stop making origami animals and her latest challenge is how small can she make them? This small apparantly!

Yes, we know that origami is a Japanese art but hey!

On Thursday we went to Aarhus for some free ballet. The Royal Danish Ballet company give free outdoor performances around Denmark at this time of year, heavily sponsored by the biggest danish bank. Since we’d never tried this before we decided to go. The weather was brilliant and it was all very friendly. People had brought their picnic baskets and we got an hour and a quarter of ballet and a very sore backside!

A couple of days ago Gwen’s school was visited by a hypnotist. It took him a long time to get the volunteers ‘under’ and the rest of the audience was starting to get restless but then he started the entertaining part. First he told the victims that they were in a train crossing the Alps in the middle of winter and that it was very cold because the heating system had broken down. And his 10 victims started shivering. One girl apparantly couldn’t speak she was shivering so violently. Then he told them that the heating was back on but had gone haywire so that it was far too hot so then they started wiping sweat off their brows. Then he told them that they were 4 years old and in a kindergarten and that today it was a sandcastle building competition so they all started making movements as though they were building then he went round interviewing them about what they had made. Then he told them that their mother had forgotten to collect them but that he could see her now. At this point he pointed to a member of the audience for each victim and they went bounding off to collect ‘their mother’ and bring her up on stage and sat on her knee. At this point it was time to come out of the trance and as soon as they realised that they were sitting on someone’s knee they jumped off like greased lightning.

OK so this is pretty standard stuff for a hypnotist but maybe it is rather different when you personally know all the victims and could interview them afterwards about what it felt like. So what did it feel like? ‘I knew what was happening but I couldn’t control myself.’

This was entertainment. While the older ones were being hypnotised, the younger ones were being entertained by a magician.

When we got home we found that our neighbour knows the hypnotist and that he’s terrible at handling horses.

Make sure that you click through all 5 photos above.

I came home last week to find these mysterious red lines leading up to our garden. What would you think? Luckily Gwen had been walking home as it was being done and she could tell us that it was the electricity company which had put them down. We can only guess that it might mean that we get optic fibre internet access in the near future. I put our name down for it over a year ago without much hope that they would do anything about it as it involves an awful lot of digging at their expense but who knows! They have brought optic fibre net to the new golf resort just down the road so they might think it worthwhile to extend it a kilometre to us?

Summer is busting out all over and as you can see we have a man to do the lawn. Tony got the T-shirt last week when he attended a conference in Aarhus. On the first day he was asked to step in at the last minute with a talk as two speakers had dropped out. So he had 5 hours in which to prepare something worthy of the audience who had come to hear about the effects of climate change on the environment. The next day he thought he might be able to relax but ended up being co-opted as a minibus driver as a trip to a local animal park, Skandinavisk Dyreparken, was arranged through the generosity of the owner who was also attending the conference. So he earned the T-shirt!