Scandinavian Roadtrip - Denmark

August 2006

Within a few days of returning from Georgia, I made a spontaneous decision to drive to Scandinavia and fill in a few gaps. How much can I see in sixteen days? My girlfriend Lori decided that she wanted to come and would drag her two kids (Kate, 12 and Colin, 9) along for the adventure. We borrowed my father’s Toyota Avensis (which had done the 8,000 mile road trip last year), filled the car with camping gear and easy food to cook, to cut down the well known expense of this part of Europe. Lori even went out and bought a tent. Bless! Old bottles of duty free rum and gin provided motivation every evening.

We caught a Norfolk Lines ferry from Dover at midnight (£68 return) and arrived in Dunkirk, France at 3am local time (Monday August 7th). While the others slept, I decided to drive to Legoland, Denmark in one go. I had left France, crossed Belgium, got lost on the Antwerp ring road, and was into Holland before anyone awoke. We pushed on through northern Germany and heavy autobahn traffic, skirting around Hamburg which had miles of jams between road works.

Just after the Danish border, we stopped for lunch at sleepy Kliplev, popping into the quaint 17th Century village church and climbing the separately restored wooden bell tower. An hour later, we reached Billund (Legoland) around 3.30pm. It had taken twelve hours from the getting off the ferry. I had driven 800 miles from leaving Norwich the night before and had been awake thirty four hours so far. Not recommended!

I had toured Denmark comprehensively in 1998 with my father on his motorbike and there is a published travel report on Denmark on my homepage, so I won’t say much. Suffice to say that while it is very easy to drive across this multi-islanded country linked by bridges (or ferries), if you stay on the main roads, you will only get the impression of a quiet, rural country that appears to have nothing interesting to see. This is because the ‘gems’ are hidden and you have to search for them – especially the wonderful stately homes/castles called ‘slots’ which are its best feature. When I looked at my old photo album from the 1998 tour, I was struck how beautiful these secret places were. Denmark is like the Japan of Europe. Beauty comes in small packages.

The Rough Guide says of Denmark “Delicately balanced between Scandinavia and mainland Europe, Denmark is a difficult country to pin down. In many ways, it shares the characteristics of both regions…..its landscape is the region’s least dramatic; very green and flat, largely farmland interrupted by innumerable pretty villages” which I think is a pretty accurate description.

Billund is the base for ‘Legoland’. Lego was invented in Denmark and they are proud of it. After pitching our tent in the expensive Legoland campsite (fortunately, the toilets/toilet paper were not made from Lego), we took advantage of the free entry at 5.30pm. A day pass will set you back £21/£18 (adult/kid). The place was packed and the rides were still going for another hour but the queues were long. Not that the rides are anything special (unless you are very young), but the Lego constructions are brilliant. We managed to do the Dragon Rollercoaster which starts as a horror ride through the castle with lots of moving lego characters and smoke. It was really impressive. The Lego land village of scenes hadn’t changed much in eight years but it was still nice to walk around and see how creative you can be with the small plastic bricks. It’s a shame that I couldn’t have been quite so creative with the hot dog sausages and baked beans I cooked for tea!

The next morning, we drove non-stop to the capital, Copenhagen, on the eastern side of Denmark. Early on, we passed through a town called Middelfart which amused the kids. After bypassing Odense (Hans Christian Anderson tourist town and second city), we crossed over the longest road bridge in world – the Great Belt - linking Denmark up. I had crossed this on motorbike a week after it opened and the car toll was then £50. I was relieved to find that the toll had dropped to £18 which was still a killer.

Copenhagen hadn’t changed much either. Parking for free, we did the few famous sights in a couple of hours starting with the Little Mermaid Statue in the harbour. This 1913 bronze sculpture of a Hans Christian Anderson fairytale character still attracted hundreds of people for a Kodak moment. Nearby was the lovely Gefion Fountain, which showed the goddess Gefion with her four sons who she had turned into oxen having been promised, in return, as much land as she could plough in a single night.

We walked by the harbour side until we reached a slender canal which divided the two sides of Nyhavn, picturesquely lined by 18th Century houses – now bars and cafes at ground level. With the moored old wooden boats and towering multicoloured houses around them, the area was packed with locals and tourists who were eating and drinking and relaxing beneath the hot summer sun.

Heading back inland, we came across the cobbled Amalienborg Plads, Copenhagen’s most famous square. It had an equestrian statue flanked by four identical Rococo palaces. Two serve as royal residences and royal guards stood motionless outside. Despite the heat and the heavy uniforms, they didn’t even break a sweat. Nearby, was the large round marble church of Frederikskirke, topped by a huge dome. We discovered that the acoustics are good enough inside so that should a nine year old boy fart, (i.e. Colin), more people will hear it, than you care to think about. You could do all these sights in ninety minutes and see some of Copenhagen’s best sights.

I had managed to get through Denmark without changing any money. I was surprised that they had not converted to the Euro and had their own Kroner currency (as did Norway and Sweden), but credit cards were taken everywhere – campsite, garage, bridge, ferry.

Rather than driving across the new Denmark-Swedish bridge, with a hefty toll, Helsingor lay further north where, for around £40, a Scanlines ferry took us right past the impressive looking 16th Century Kronberg Slot. This is promoted as Hamlet’s castle of Elsinore, but Shakespeare never visited Denmark and Hamlet was based on an earlier character.