Hundested

We had a quiet 20-odd mile trip to Hundsted. The afternoon was 'free', so the brothers went for a cycle ride and ended up playing a few games of Backgammon and having a beer or two at a 'picnic table' at the harbour. You find these places everywhere in Denmark and the nice thing is that they are used so well!





Tomorrow, the boys will take the train to Copenhagen and fly back to London. It has been great to have them here for almost a week and we'll miss them as usual!

But life goes on and we are planning ahead. We'll stay here tomorrow; it's a very nice harbour with a lot of lively atmosphere. And we need to do some shopping and washing. On Friday, the plan is to go up the Roskilde Fjord.

So no blog post planned for tomorrow. More on Friday night.

As far North as we'll go

We are now in Gilleleje, the most northern harbour on Sæland. It's also as far north as we'll go this trip. We are at 56 degrees 20 minutes north. Although technically when we leave the harbour tomorrow on our way to Hundested we will be a bit further North, this is 'officially' as far as we'll go.

This morning we still had good, free Internet and this is how the boat looked:





Gilleleje is a very nice, quite substantive fishing port:





Tomorrow the destination is Hundested. From there, there is a good train connection to Copenhagen, which the boys will use to get back on Thursday. Greg will then stay with Sean in London for another week and fly back to Cape Town on 8 August.

Our plans have changed a bit. We really like Denmark and to 'do' the North German lakes and Berlin as we were intending to do, would require us to move to Lübeck post haste and then spend some 5 hours a day motoring to get to Berlin and back to Holland by the end of September. That really is not what we want to do, so we will slowly go back South, either through the Store or Lille Bælt. Then possibly to Lübeck, but after the Lübeck - Elbe canal turn starboard and head towards Hamburg. Then via the Geeste to Bremerhaven and the Küstenkanal further West. We can then, depending on the timing, decide to go either to the North of the Netherlands (Groningen), or more South and enter via the Rhine.

It's the first time we are actually planning the 'way back....'

Helsingør, Hamlet's castle

After spending the night on Ven, in Sweden, we left for Helsingør which is on the Danish side of the Northern entrance to the Øresund. On the Swedish side is Helsingborg and the Sund is only just over 3 miles wide at this point. Back in the 14th century, the Danes built a castle here, so that taxes could be levied on ships wanting to sail through the Sund. The castle was eventually called Kronenborg. It features in Shakespeare's Hamlet as Elsingore, the castle of the 'King of Denmark'.
Today it is a World Heritage Site and we went to see it, after we tied the boat up in the Helsingør Marina.





Kronberg Caste from the water.






Harold the Dane is sitting in the catacombs of the castle. Folklore says that he will wake up and defend Denmark when it is in danger.





Of course we had to have another 'braai' with the boys.....





Before the rainstorm struck.

Location:Campingvej,Helsingor,Denmark

Kyrkbacken, Ven, Sweden

Today, the boys hoisted the Swedish courtesy flag!





Between Denmark and Sweden, in the Sund, there is an island called 'Ven', which is actually Swedish and we decided to spend a night there.
It is actually a very nice place to stop. One of the three harbours is called 'Kyrkbacken', which literally means 'behind the church'. This is the view of the church from the harbour, which explains the name:





It's a very pretty and rural place. And quite a small harbour. This is seen from the church:






With our South African background, we decided to have a 'braai'. That was a bit of a mission, we bought a 'ready to go' braai (which is not very South African at all), plus it started to rain a bit. But our South African braai masters did us proud and we had nice braaied chicken:





Back to Denmark, Helsingor, tomorrow.

Copenhagen. And a surprise!

We have spent the last two days doing the 'tourist thing'.

Tivoli and of course the 'Lille Hafvruen' are old hat to us:





And a big surprise today was the arrival of our boys! Greg, Sean and I have been planning since January to have them with us for Lyn's birthday tomorrow. So today, without her knowing about it, they walked up to the boat and said 'hi mom'. An emotional moment, it is 15 months ago that we were all together.





The boys will be with us until Thursday, so we are looking forward to share a bit of our 'travelling life' with them. Tomorrow we'll stay here to celebrate the (50 th!) birthday. On Sunday we'll move on, possibly to the island of Ven, which is actually Swedish.

The weather is still good, but is expected to change overnight. Forecast is a bit of rain, but not too bad for the next few days.

København

Note that this is the second post today, the first one shows yesterday's pictures.

There was almost no wind this morning, a perfect day to get to Copenhagen, the seriously unofficial destination of the trip.
From Bøgeskov, we had to cross the Køge Bucht (sorry, Bucht is German and not Danish but it is what our charts say as they are German). That is a 14nm trip, so a bit over 2 hours. Then it's still another 2 hours to get to the marinas, which tend to be North of the city (there are a few to the south as well, but they don't have as good access to the centre).

First you get to Drogden Light, with a huge 'windpark' behind it.





And then to the Øresund bridge, the bridge wich connects Denmark and Sweden.





It is 55m high. We don't cross underneath it, as part of the crossing close to the Danish side is actually a tunnel which we pass over. The tunnel and bridge take a railway line as well as a motorway.

There was a fair amount of 'pleasure boat traffic', motor as well as sail, but not a lot of commercial craft on the water.

Now we are tied up in Svanemølle harbour. It is huge, with over 1100 berths (we are in 1007). Very different from what we have seen and come to enjoy so much over the past few weeks. But very conveniently positioned with the public transport to the city centre a few hundred metres away.

So for the next few days we will be sight seeing, doing a bit of 'admin' and last but not least, celebrate Lyn's birthday. We won't post a blog entry every day, but more as needs dictate. In principle, we plan to leave here on Sunday, we are still mulling about the route from here: North or South, that is the question....

Location:Strandpromenaden,Copenhagen,Denmark

Yesterday's pictures

I still owe you some pictures from yesterday's interesting trip and as I don't want to cause confusion with today, I'll post them here separately.
The entire trip was past Stevn's Klint. First we came to the church of which part fell into the sea:





Then we got to Stevn's Fyr, the lighthouse. Here you can see really well how the chalk layer erodes and the limestone above stays in place. We wonder when there will be a big cave-in here:





And then of course we got to Bøgeskov, in the middle of nowhere (but what a nice place!).