Day 11, Thursday, June 11, 2009 This morning we said good-bye to our Askov folk school and headed east in our bus toward Copenhagen. We passed fields of red poppies, fields of bright green pastures, and lots of farms. At 1pm we arrived at our hotel in the small town of Hillerod just north of Copenhagen. Evidently hotel rooms in Copenhagen were fully booked months ahead of time by a medical conference and other conferences so we had to stay outside the city. After lunch our bus took us into Copenhagen but unfortunatley it was raining. We and 4 others decided [View Full Entry]

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Day 10 - June 10, 2009 - from Askov, Denmark Today was my favorite day in Denmark. We left the Askov Hojskole (Folk School) in the morning for an all day excursion to the town of Odense ( the letter "d" is silent), the 4th largest city in Denmark. The main reason for our visit was to visit the museum of Hans Christian Andersen and the Open Air Museum. Odense, located at the mouth of Odense Fjord, is one of the Danish cities with the most ancient history. It is named for the pagan Odin indicating that Odin must have been [View Full Entry]

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Day 9 - Tuesday, June 9, 2009 This morning in our Danish history and culture presentation by Professor Dochweiler we learned that in 1536 King Christian III took over the Catholic churches and monasteries confiscating their money and treasure. He then announced to his subjects that they were now protestants! Denmark became a democracy in 1848 when a new constitution was written based on and inspired by that of the U.S and France but most of all by the constituion of Belguim! Since the country was now a democracy the citizens needed to be educated and thus folk schools were extablished [View Full Entry]

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Day 8 - Monday, June 8, 2009 We had an introduction to Danish history today. Our professor from the folk school was Henning Dochweiler who has recently returned from Vienna where he was the head of the Danish Institute of Culture for 30 years! Denmark has a total population of 5.4 million people and is only the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined. At one time it also included Norway, Sweden, the northern part of Germany and the Baltic coastline, Iceland and Greenland. (Tallin, the capitol of Estonia, means city of Danes.) In the time of the Vikings Denmark also [View Full Entry]

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Day 7 -June 7, 2009 After eating breakfast on the ferry and then struggling to get our luggage down the narrow passageways, and in and out of the elevator and off the ship we found our bus and driver, Lars. We then set off with our Group Leader, Carl for the 3 hour ride to the Askov Højskole, the first folkschool in Denmark. It was built in 1865. Gene and I actually have a small three room flat a few minutes walk from the main campus. This folk school is different than the one in Norway because it is actually 3 [View Full Entry]

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Day 6 --June 6, 2009 Klepp, Norway We had an excursion to the nearby North Sea's Jæren beaches, the most famous beaches in Norway. They are wide and full of soft sand. They are rimmed with dunes covered with planted vegetaion to prevent erosion. The beaches of Norway are all protected and no building is allowed along the shore. All the beaches are open to the public. The sea is a surprising clear, aqua in the shallow water reminiscient of the Caribbean, and then the water turns dark blue in the deep water. And, of course, unlike the Caribbean it [View Full Entry]

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Friday, June 5, 2009 This is our favoriate day so far on our three week Scandinavian adventure. The weather gods were kind to us and the seemingly gale force winds we had experienced four days straight vanished with the night! Thank goodness! We had a full day excursion starting with a bus ride from the folk school in Kleppe (near the port of Stavanger) to the tiny Lauvvik where we caught a boat ride on the Lysefjord which is 42 kilometers long. The boat trip lasted about 2.5 hours and the scenery was magnificent. The fjord is narrow and the mountains [View Full Entry]

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Day 4, June 4, 2009 The sky is so blue here and the air seems especially clear. The sparkling water of the fjords with their frothy white caps is lovely but that cold wind off the North Sea has been really cold! We had a guest lecturer this morning, a tall, slim Norweigan dressed in black jeans, blue and white stripped long sleeve shirt and black sneakers. He spoke excellent English so it was easy to understand him. He told us he had been a manager in one of the petroleum companies but hated his job so he had taken a [View Full Entry]

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We landed in to Stavanger, Norway this afternoon at 1pm local time, 22 hours after we had left our home in The Villages, FL. We flew US Air to Philadelphia and Lufthansa to Frankfurt and then a smaller Lufthansa plane to Stavanger, Norway. Hurray! I wrote the above information last night after 10pm local time but decided to stop and go to bed. The moon was up but it was still quite light outside. Today, Wednesday, June 3rd. We are part of a three week Elderhostel trip, called The Spirit of Scandinavia. Our accomodations for this week are in the [View Full Entry]

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