Denmark!

I don't see new countries often enough, living so relatively close to so many. Finally a new one for me! I'd read on the Internet that Denmark is the best country on earth to live in, the happiest people live there, with the greatest quality of life. It made me very excited to drive across the border.

We stayed the night at our friends' home in Delmenhorst and I sure wish I had friends like them here. We were back in our old guest room, listening to the trains at night, like so long ago. Keia if you're reading this I'd love a copy of the photo you took!

We left their place that morning after a leisurely fantastic breakfast (and I drank way too much coffee) and hit the road to our hotel at the tippy-top of Germany in a place called Flensburg.

Except in Hamburg it was pouring rain so hard I decided to leave the Autobahn (A7) and let J take a turn driving. In my attempt to be safe, I was hit by an LKW (semi). How ironic. If I'd just stayed on the Autobahn....

(Denmark story to come, I just have to talk about this first.)

There was a loud crash and J woke up "What was that" and my car skittered to the right, sliding sideways, and I felt the terror of being squeezed between something and the guard rail (no shoulder). The dash board lit up with warnings and we looked and saw this big blue thing (but at that moment we couldn't tell what it was) at just behind the driver's seat.

I stopped, the semi stopped behind me, and I fumbled around for the safety vest. In Germany you must have a safety vest on if you get out of your car. My hands were shaking so badly I handed it to J to get it out of its plastic sack. His hands were shaking too so I ripped it open and he put it on and jumped out. I could not get out, LKWs were screaming by me constantly, apparently they all wanted this particular interchange. It was an interchange between two Autobahns, it was 3 lanes wide, we were in the right.

I suddenly felt pain in my back, like I couldn't move. I squirmed around, trying to move. I could, but it was scary.

As soon as J left the car I remembered "the number for 911" as  Homer Simpson would say, and dialed it.

It's 110. The number I've been dreading calling.

Because I've had dreams about dialing the police, or the fire dept (112) since living here, and in my dreams it never worked. We never understood each other. In real life, it worked. They answered immediately "Police". I explained what happened and then began the lengthy process of trying to figure out exactly where we were.

As I described it, suddenly the LKW driver came to my window in the pouring rain, phone to his ear, asking me where we are. I said, "I have no idea" and shut my window. Those were the only words exchanged between us - I refused to speak to him again.

J came back and told me that my side of the car was dented in, and I suddenly surprised myself by becoming very angry. Not about my beloved car (which I love more than I should), but that we could have been killed. I teared up and J said, "I'm so sorry." I said, "He could have killed us - LKW drivers need to be more careful! They kill people regularly, my car is bright red, how could he not see it...."

J said the driver was in a panic. He said, "YOU BROKE THE LAW, YOU PASSED ME ON THE RIGHT!" (Illegal in Germany.) J said, "Wait, I was not driving."

He said, "You were speeding, it was a 50 zone!"

He said, "I was blinking to get over for a very long time and you would not let me!"

I spent the next 2 days pondering those possibilities, because none of them make sense - he was behind me. In all three of his statements, it implied he SAW ME. Right? It's possible I was in the process of passing him on the right, that's true, because of where he hit me. But I have to say, my frame of mind at that moment was passive. I was feeling stress from the rain and lack of visibility, so I was just giving up, leaving the autobahn. I was not feeling racy or ambitious.

The police never even asked me how fast I was going. He said it's obvious I was the victim and he just took my statement. I made sure that my statement included "A big blue thing" and not "A semi" cuz we were not able to recognize at that moment what it was. My car has blue all over the rear quarter.

I asked if the driver would lose his job. No, the police said, only if he had broken another law, like how long he's allowed to drive in a day. I wasn't angry anymore, but I needed to be convinced that my car was still driveable. The cop said in his experience, yes.

I let J drive through the harbor tunnel, and then I asked if I could drive again, to "get back on the horse." My main issue through this was that I would lose my  nerve to ever drive on the Autobahn again. In fact, just a few hours before, we'd spoken to our host and she'd said she's done with Autobahns. What a pity, I thought. But I totally understand. It's exhausting to drive on the Autobahns. It's dangerous. You can't imagine if you haven't done it, driving equally from your rear-view mirror as your windshield.

I can do it. I am fine. Thank God, and I did, over and over.

Now onto Flensburg and Denmark.....




We call it Denmark. Germans call it Daenemark. Danish people call it Danmark!? OK then. I realized soon after arrival we'd never asked how to say hello in Denmarkish. Oh dear.




In Flensburg next to our hotel was a very interesting supermarket, similar to Target. Danish people were shopping like crazy, because the prices in Germany are so much better. We just needed water, and ice for my new fancy cooler.




Every second customer was loading up on deposit-free drinks. Cans. CANS! No one drinks cans here. But they didn't want to have to return the bottles, so they loaded their carts to the brim with beer cans and pop cans and I had a Costco flashback. Truly, is Denmark so much more expensive? And poor me, I'd love to not have to deal with deposit bottles every week of my life, returning them to the store!



Our budget hotel, and our dinner. I was thrilled because after all these years of not camping, and not owning a cooler, I finally bought one, and could bring lunch meat and cheese on our road trip. Since the restaurant didn't look good to me, this was what we had here, both nights!

Before Denmark, I have to tell you about our first night in Flensburg. We went for a geocache and found a big industrial area by our budget hotel. Think Kent, Washington. Nothing but warehouses behind huge fences. Then nestled in between them, was a 2 acre lot with 3 mares and their little foals beside them. I was overcome. How is this possible! I looked around and no, just warehouses with lights out (it was the weekend) and not a soul in sight for kilometers. We were the only ones.

I looked and each mare and each foal had a warmblood brand of some kind. I am sorry to say I don't know all the brands so I don't know what they were. But I know how proud north Germany is of its warmbloods. In fact, at a rest stop there was a list of local attractions and one was a warmblood farm.

After we found the cache, I plundered a corn field (oh, yah, there was also agriculture in this industrial area) and picked branches from hazelnut and threw them over the fence to the warmbloods and their babies. One baby was too scared but the other two munched up my offering. Yah, this is what happens when you put your broodmares and foals in the middle of an industrial complex. Tourists from middle Germany feed them. I'm not into baby horses, but these ones were enchanting. Poor J had to wait....

In the morning, on to Denmark. Happiest place on earth (outside of Disneyland).



Look, it's Denmark! Good, still part of the union I see.





First cache. J is reading Danish translations into German so I can take notes to find the multicache.



There were a lot of Germans on vacation here, so I never really could discern which of the people in the woods/beaches were the happiest people on earth.



Ah, "Puget Sound" - but without mountains. It felt so good to be around salt water again, in Europe. What I loved most was the constant refreshing breeze. What surprised me was how mellow it smelled,  it didn't hit you, the smell of the water.

This is the Flensburg Fjord. Fjord is the word for Sound. (Ocean inlet). In this case, an inlet from the Ostsee (East Sea) or, in English, the Baltic. J asked if I wanted to taste it, cuz I always taste new oceans, but I'd been to the Baltic before. Then again, it was full of pretty shells, so in my picking them up, I did taste it.



I loved seeing boats again. Where we live, no one has a boat. Where would they float it?



We discussed constantly whether how the bluffs above the water reminded us more of Alki, Discovery Park, or Lincoln Park. There were wooden stairways going up the bluffs so we didn't have to use our hands to climb up. Like the Lincoln Park. It was so fun to see Denmark's beaches as another Seattle.



And apparently I've been away long enough to take a photo of seaweed. *Sigh*



The homes along the water were magnificent. Some I even called mansions.



Most had such shiny roofs! And this one, a Volvo. The further toward Sweden you go in Europe, the more Volvos you see! Wonderful, I miss them. Germany has a few.







Like arriving my first time in England, there were horses and cows over the salt water. Europe doesn't distinguish between agriculture, industry, ocean, nor suburb and rural.



Whoa, homes with straw roofs. Is this Holland!? I love it. I wonder how often they catch fire cuz someone smoked a cigarette. This house looks to be made of wood even, how American.



Do they groom their roofs to keep them so orderly?



Can you see the thick straw? How exactly does that work?



After the flatness of north Germany, it was fun to see Denmark was full of rolling, shallow hills.



Coming into town, I saw my first European draw bridge. OK I must admit, they obviously exist here! Felt like home, waiting for the sailboats to go under the road.



The weather was "wait five minutes, if you don't like it" and truly it was alternating storm clouds and invigorating wind, and balmy sun, with people throwing sticks into the water for their dogs. Every time we'd pass other hikers on the trail, I'd say "Hallo" cuz I don't know how to say hello in Danish. If I could have, I'd have asked a Danish person if a Danish pastry is what we think of it in America. Probably not...just something else to ponder. Do the Danish people know what  Danish is? : )



Although it looks like J left those wet footprints, they are actually from an old man who biked down to the nearly empty shore, took off his clothes down to his trunks at a bench, jumped in, swam a few laps, and then got out. That water was not warm. Respect.











I got it. 112 for fire dept, 110 for police. The rest of the signs had equally bad German as English. We read and laughed a bit.



Crops next to the water.



Wheat, I think.



J said this is definitely oats. I said I have no idea. He said as a horse owner I should know. I said how should I know what an oat field looks like? OK Europeans know their crops better than Seattleites.



Black water.



Same water, not black.






California Cormorant?! What the heck!



Many of the houses had the Denmark flag flying. Unlike Germany, they are a flag flying nation.




Grain, light house, how different Europe is.




One of the villages we left (the sign with the red stripe means "leaving this town"). There was a massive rolling horse field with 4 furry Icelandics grazing here.

We found only a few caches, but spent the day looking, on Denmark's "most beautiful seaside road." Like Highway 101 back home, sort of.

We had Chinese food in town for lunch, which turned out to be incredibly expensive. The waitress spoke no German, and only a few words of English, so that was frustrating. The table next to us was a German family who knew even less English than we do, and they had a really hard time ordering! It's always fun, in Europe, to try to order food when you don't speak the language. This has only happened to me recently in Italy and Belgium. Some countries seem proud to not have any knowledge of English, and that's fine with me, it makes it entertaining to order food.

Denmark was raincoats and sunscreen. I loved it.

  It was everything I'd hoped for.


***

I made a little video tonight of Mag playing around with sticks and nuzzling my leg as I waited for J to return from a geocaching event today. You can also see him arrive, and Mag sigh, "Oh, it's J."

I'm torn between thinking the birch branches/sticks are a good thing, to entertain him, and a horrible idea, he'll poke his eye out.



As an update, I trimmed his hinds this afternoon and they look much better, and there seems to be an abscess exploding on the coronet band directly above where the vet dug the hole on Monday. (Pics to come) My trimmer promised to come by next week. I can hope and pray that my horse will be pain free soon.