Dejligt

How lovely to be home after a very full week of vacation! Here's what we did:

Day 1: Drove from Nesodden to Larvik, where we took the dreaded Danskebåt to Hirtshals. Here we are on the short ferry ride from Moss to Horten. We were joined later in the week by R's 16-year-old daughter, C:

CL, E, R, E, and KE.

We stayed at a campground outside of Hirtshals the first night since the boat got in pretty late.

Day 2: played at the campground before driving south through Jylland all the way to Billund. Here's the campground with our little cubicle:

And here is the amazing jumping bubble at the playground:

After a leisurely morning we started out, with a planned stop at one of the coolest Viking sites I know of, Lindholm Høje just north of Aalborg. We were greeted at the parking lot by a flock of archaic Viking sheep with some pretty natty dreads:

The site itself is a hillside covered in Viking burials, most with standing stones in the shape of ships. Here are some modern day Vikings posing there:

We stopped in Århus for an early dinner and grocery shopping, and arrived in the early evening at the stud farm where we spend the week. It's called Skandihest, and it's both absolutely lovely and absolutely crawling with flies. We stayed in a very cool apartment in a converted pig barn:

Day 3: We weren't quite up for Legoland just yet, so we went to the neighboring Lalandia, which I guess can best be described as an amusement mall. They have a huge water park, and very cool trampolines with riggings that allow you to jump really high. E very cautiously tried it out:

Day 4: We decided it would be a good idea to go to Legoland later in the day, so I was able to jump in the car and drive an hour down to a town called Kolding, where garn.dk has its distribution center. The people who work there were incredibly nice. They let me wander through the rows and rows of shelves filled with yarns. I had picked out a series of colors of their Shetlandsuld and was delighted to find smaller amounts of all but one of them on the cone, which meant that the price was 39 DKK per 100 gram, rather than 59 DKK to get the same 100 grams wound into a skein. Here's what I got to work with:

The two gray-green cones are for Fulmar, and the rest will be some kind of fair isle pullover. I'm very excited, at it is absolutely lovely yarn! More on this in a later post, I'm sure...

After my whirlwind trip down to Kolding and a quick lunch it was on to Legoland. It wasn't as overwhelming as I had feared, and E had a very nice time, I think. Here he is in his newly-acquired pirate gear:

He absolutely loved riding on the roller coaster in the castle. I was terrified and had my eyes closed the whole time. He also really liked the old models with moving planes, boats, and vehicles. I liked the bulk Lego section of the Lego store the best, but I wish they had more selection. I was at least able to increase our holdings in lime green Legos substantially.

Day 5: We discovered that the nearby city of Vejle is on the coast, and our vacation-mates were eager to go to the beach. We ended up at Tirsbæk beach, which is totally all right as far as beaches go. I'm not much of a beach person, but I did enjoy the fact that my knitting (the Garnstudio tunic) almost exactly matched the color of the sand:

And how can I resist seeing two happy kids building a sand castle?

Day 6: The 280-year-old Vorbasse market opened on Thursday, and our friends were eager to shop the hundreds of booths there. We were slightly less eager, but went along for a while. Having gotten his feet wet at Legoland, E was totally up for the carnival rides, and it was hard to coax (drag) him away from them. The only really bad thing that happened on our vacation was that I managed to lose my crochet hook somewhere at this enormous market. I had been crocheting dishrags with the left over linen yarn but had to give that up. My only remaining project was the Bridgewater shawl, which turned out to be too difficult for vacation knitting now that I'm finished with the garter stitch square and am picking up stitches for the lace borders.

Day 7: Our last full day staying at Skandihest, and we were pretty low energy. We decided to go to the campground at Randbøldal, where our friends had gone while we were relaxing on the farm earlier in the week. E really enjoyed it, and he and I spent a long time building a city in the sand. Since it was a lake, we were able to build a really complex coastal city with all kinds of islands and inlets right at water's edge.

Day 8: We headed out early, driving up to Frederikshavn to catch a ferry to Göteborg. Trapped on yet another tourist boat, there wasn't much to do but shop and play in the kid's section. E bought a pen that lights up and twirls around, and for some reason he burst out with "Discoparty i rumpa til pappa!" really loud while we were standing in line to pay. It was a little obscene (but very funny) so I had to take a picture:

Unfortunately there was tons of construction underway on the route (E45) we had to take to get to the pension we had booked for our last night, Pensionat Stenliden, which is just outside Trollhättan:

 After dinner in the local Pizza House (very reminiscent of Fares Fares' movie Kopps, by the way) we took a short walk along the river. The light was fantastic. Here's a snap of me in the newly finished linen tunic:

I've been wearing it every day since I finished it. I totally love it. It was so worth it to rip out the other tunic and reknit it. We had an uneventful night there, and a long drive home in the rain and more construction along E6. And now we're home and I've given a fairly full account of my movements over the past few days.

A few stray details: I was taught how to play a very ruthless card game called 500, which I dubbed FRP-spillet, since it was so merciless. I bought Henning Mankell's most recent Kurt Wallander novel, Den orolige mannen from 2009 and a few dozen pages in it is very engrossing. I learned that my family has a significantly lower activity level than our friends have. There were two bordellos on opposite sides of the road right near our farm. They were marked with only small neon signs in the window that said "open." Very discrete, and kind of creepy and fascinating at the same time. Nearly every second farm house in Vejle kommune is, somewhat mysteriously, for sale. I reconfirmed that I am a poor loser in cards. I made a really good pasta salad. It was a good vacation. What else is there to say?

Lister

What to bring for a week in Jutland? First is the knitting basket:

1. In-progress Drops Lin Tunic 112-24
2. In-progress Bridgewater shawl
3. Printout of the 112-24 pattern
4. Jared Flood's Made in Brooklyn
5. Tove Fevang's Helt enkel hekling (will use any left over linen yarn to make dishrags)
6. photocopy of Fulmar pattern from Alice Starmore's Aran Knitting (I'm planning on buying the yarn for this at garn.dk in Kolding)
7. My ancient black accessories bag (scissors, stitch markers, stitch holders, tapestry needles, measuring tape, needle gauge, crochet hooks, cable needle, seam ripper)

Other reading materials:

1. Arne Garborg. Ein biografi by Tor Obrestad (on page 70 right now, and really enjoying it)
2. Arne Garborg's kulturnasjonalisme. To studiar by Morten Haug Frøyen and Sveinung Time
3. The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings by Peter Sawyer
4. The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings by John Haywood
5. Euro-Road Atlas Scandinavia: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland

Based on the list, you can see that I'm brushing up on my Garborg and terribly excited about revisiting Lindholm Høje and seeing the Jelling stones for the first time! I'm trying to see if I can squeeze in a visit to Moesgård Museum to see Grauballe Man (a bog body), but I'm not sure I can get anyone else to go along with me (it's over an hour from where we'll be staying). Bummer! I think everyone thinks I'm crazy with all the Bronze and Iron Age sites on my wish list...

Arbeidspress

UPDATED:

This is one of those cranked-up weeks for me, where I'm racing to get a million things done. We're leaving for Denmark on Saturday ACK! I mean Friday, so there's an extra incentive. Here's my to-do list for the week:

1. Finish corrections on the proofs on my Når vi døde vågner article for Ibsen Studies
2. Finish revisions on my Døleviser article for Scandinavica
3. Apply to become a "totalkunde" rather than a regular "kunde" at my bank so that I can stop paying unnecessary fees and get 2.5% interest on my savings account
4. Apply for "studierett" so that I can take a class this fall (this is a horrible task, as they require all sorts of documentation that I don't have
5. Finish a draft of my paper for the upcoming IASS conference in Lund, Sweden
6. Get my plane ticket to said conference
7. Change hotel reservation, since I won't be staying for the whole conference
8. Figure out ground transportation to and from the conference
9. Figure out the details of our trip home from Denmark
10. Plan with the other family we'll be vacationing with
11. Do laundry early enough that the clothes will be air-dried by the time we leave (we don't own a dryer)

Today's only Wednesday, so I really shouldn't be panicking, but of course I am.

ETA: got 6 out of 8 pages done on the IASS paper, which really isn't all that bad. I worked up to the point where I really didn't have anything more to write because I need to do more research.

Viktige tall

I had no idea it would be this hard to blog while on vacation. And I guess I haven't really been trying either. Here it is so far, in Harper's Magazine style numbers:

Hours spent detained in the San Francisco International Airport Immigration Office: 3

Number of times E vomited on the trip from Oslo to San Francisco: 4

Number of suitcases lost: 1 (out of 2)

Number of trolley rides in San Francisco: 5

Number of carousel rides: 2

Number of World Cup Soccer matches watched while in Eugene: at least 10

Number of stores visited while on a whirlwind girl's overnight visit to Seattle: at least 10

Number of skeins of yarn purchased: 4

Maximum number of Eugene friends hung out with in the course of a single day: 6

Number of boxes of books packed while clearing out my old office: 15 (and counting)

Number of calories consumed while celebrating graduation with my Ph.D. student and his family at Ruthie B's in Springfield: probably around 3000 (still recovering a week later)

Number of sweaters purchased at Goodwill for reclaiming yarn: 3

Price for three sweaters at Goodwill: 10 dollars

Number of linen dishrags crocheted: 3

Number of socks knitted for E: 3 and a half

We've had a lot of fun. We're getting a little homesick. We'll be back in Norway on Saturday.