yo ho ho and a bottle of rum

some things never get old. some things are always fun.

when little amelia comes to visit, the first toys she usually pulls out of the toy basket are the baby-hand size, square duplo blocks. she loves to click them together into tall, wobbly towers and take them apart again, one block at a time. my kids played with the same colorful plastic squares and rectangles she plays with—such sturdy and long-lasting toys, good stuff, these chunky danish blocks for toddlers.

we went to legoland in denmark when the kids were little and the opportunity presented itself. we'd always had a house full of legos, so what fun it was for them to walk through miniature lego villages and see those intricate plastic creations made entirely of snap together bricks, and then to drive a legoland car and get a legoland driver's license. that was the time we were visiting our danish friends and business associates who lived a short distance away from the theme park. (today their son, martin, actually works for lego.)

then there was the time the danes came over here, intent on heading into the wilds of maine. i remember when ed, city-boy bjorn, james, martin and a few other guys (including two more danes) went on a father/son, canoe/camping trip in "our" wilderness. that was the second time (the first one was also a maine canoe trip) and final time bjorn ever did anything quite as, shall i say, rustic and primitive as that in his life. (five days of no showers—but there was great swimming—no outhouses, and rough spots along the beautiful river, with just enough room under the trees for tents and a campfire, to call home for the night.) early in our marriage i also enjoyed doing this trip a few times, paddling along the remote west branch of the penobscot river and down wind-whipped chesuncook lake. i wonder why we could never get bjorn to set foot in the maine woods again. two visits that included roughing it were enough, i guess.

but back to the legos. james was addicted to legos and played with the smaller bricks until he was about eleven, building his way through the age levels, patiently putting together many boxes of intricate pirate and space and technic sets. once, when he was home from college, i looked wistfully into a box filled with the broken-apart, mixed-together colored bits of two wrecked pirate ships and asked him if he could please reconstruct them into their original glory. james was happy to do so. he rebuilt one ship (with hardly a glance at the instructions) and promised to do the other one soon. (that was almost ten years ago—i really need to get after him to rebuild the second one when he's home in maine.)

i like to look at the pirate ship, that remnant of fleeting years—complete with scruffy little eye-patched pirates ready to fire a canon or pistol in your face—from time to time. occasionally i run a dust cloth over it, but i quickly lose my patience. the spaces between the round connector bumps are impossible to get completely clean without picking at them for an hour with a Q-tip, or soaking the whole thing in water. (who the heck has time for that?) the pirate ship remains, as always, displayed on a shelf—dusty but intact—a relic from the past lives of children, a reminder of halcyon days spun from seemingly endless childhood.

in a thatch roof cottage

{a sweet retreat in horsens, denmark}

while looking over pictures from our trip i noticed right away that i have a gazillion shots of cottages and flowers. hmmmm.... am i just a wee bit obsessed with cottages and flowers? the thing is, cottages in denmark and england are so cozy and snug looking—especially the tudor style ones—and lusciously  painted in the most delightful colors, i can't resist them. we don't have anything quite as quaint as thatch roofs in the states (i have never seen one here, though i am sure they exist).

i am always imagining that one of those thatch beauties has a fantastic story in its long history. once upon a time in a yellow, thatch roof cottage in denmark (or england).....

a tingly, excited child-like feeling— i have been transported to a fairytale land, to a completely different time and place!—, fills you as you walk past cultivated fields, up a rise, around a corner and suddenly an isolated, old cottage with absolutely no signs of 21st century life anywhere appears. magical. *sigh* a big thank you to henrietta for taking me on a tour of horsens and the countryside around horsens. the picnic at horsens fjord was the best!

{fairytale thatch cottage near soevind on the way to horsens fjord}

{a gorgeous thatch roof in juelsminde, denmark}

{near the center of horsens}

{a hidden courtyard in horsens}

pretty denmark

you put on a sweater and grab a beer. you stretch out and look up and notice that the sails, listless a minute ago, are filling with wind, are beginning to dance and play in the air. the journey to juelsminde started with fog and ghostly vessels appearing suddenly in the murk as if out of nowhere, and will end with bright clarity and sun, breezes and a sparkling sea.

you arrive at your destination. the marina is alive with activity as the captain, assisted by his attractive and athletic wife, maneuvers the sailboat neatly into her slip. you help clean up the lunch dishes, pull off your sweater and get ready to haul yourself and your bags off the boat and into the car.

on the drive you are given a tour of the small, picturesque harbor town of juelsminde. it is very clean, very orderly, filled with cafes and shops. the neighborhoods are quaint, comfortable, the gardens well-tended and filled with color. you could live here in pretty denmark.

at grethe's house you walk around the garden with her and then relax on the terrace with a cup of tea and a piece of marzipan. her husband tells you the story of the "eel field" behind the house as you sit and watch the birds in the bird feeders. there are an awful lot of danish birds indulging in a raucous chorus of birdsong out in the backyard. the birds are much noisier than at home. is that possible?

you laugh about the wine box dispenser attached to the house next to the terrace and it reminds you of the story knud told about how he and some friends used a sailboat to smuggle booze out of germany via the sea. they poured hard liquor into empty wine boxes to avoid the extremely high taxes that existed in denmark before the formation of the european union.

soon it is time to go. you say thanks for the great time you had on the s/s mary, and you and grethe give each other a big hug. hellos are so much better than good-byes......

sailing to bogense

we were horribly late because we ended up getting stuck in rush hour traffic around copenhagen. but our danish hosts, grethe and knud, who had invited us to sail up the lille baelt (little sound) with them and spend the night in bogense before heading to juelsminde, were gracious and unconcerned about our tardy arrival and the fact that we wouldn't get to bogense until around 9:30 that night. of course, at this time of year, it doesn't really ever get totally dark in scandinavia so night time cruises are, in fact, perpetual twilight cruises.

due to a complete lack of wind, our evening sail turned into a motoring expedition. curious dolphins and seals popped up near the boat. the sky formed a monochromatic backdrop for us, a smooth sheet of deep gray dipping into the sea and blocking out the horizon line, a scene in which we floated by a flat, solid gray canvas world surrounding our watery stage on all sides.

instead of the busy bogense marina, we tied up alongside the actual village of bogense which jutted out on two narrow slices of peninsula on both sides of the canal-like inlet where our hosts would spend the night on their boat. it was so nice to turn off the motor and hear the water lapping against the side of the 38-foot s/s mary. there were only a few other boats tied up opposite ours and except for a small party at one restaurant, no people were to be seen.

the lovely little danish village consisted of a mixture of newer and older small, two-story buildings, the newer ones in a style i call danish modern, oftentimes with dramatic roofline angles, a sea of long windows and, of course, my favorite red-tiled european roofs. running down the middle of each thin strip of land was a row of houses with grass all around and a sliver of a road on one side. that's all. definitely my cup of tea.

{strib lighthouse enroute to bogense}

knud told us that in order to live in the village a business must occupy the first floor of your house. i was surprised by this since bogense looked very much like a sleepy little hamlet of private homes when, in fact, each ground floor held a shop, restaurant, tiny hotel, or bed and breakfast. (we stayed at friendly lund's, where our room faced seaward and we could open the door, walk across the grass and go for a dip in the ocean, had the weather been warmer.)

i realized they maintained the cozy feeling of the place by displaying only small, unobtrusive signs on the buildings (indeed so small that i didn't even notice them at first). and of course this was a neighborhood filled with families going about their daily routines. in addition, the one road on each side was narrow and the parking areas were really just extensions of driveways, very small by american standards; obviously most of the traffic in bogense was by boat.

in the morning we set sail for juelsminde.