Our First Day Trip

After visiting the open air market, we took a road trip through the Danish country side and visited (sort of) the towns of Skanderborg and Silkeborg. (The first map below should be placed to the left of the first map.)



We started by travelling soutwest from Aarhus to get to the town of Skanderborg. It looked like a nice town but we didn't get to see much of it because it had been invaded by a music festival and closed to automobile traffic as a result. Instead, we got to see a lot of tents and just a glimpse of the lake that is visible on the first map above.





The tents were there because the music festival lasts for a week or two and people camp out in order to attend the whole thing. The city provides a bus service that goes between the festival and the tents and this keeps the attendees from trying to drive, which is a good thing because we saw a lot of tipsy attendees getting off a bus, beers in hand! (I thought it was a nice juxtaposition of the Dane's ability to party while also being very organized; speaking of parties, this morning, all of Denmark was celebrating their 4-1 football victory over England . It was an especially hard day for the English foreign exchange student, Matthew, who attends our Danish language class: The German students couldn't stop smirking at him, and the Danes were letting him have it!)

Since we couldn't actually get into the city, we decided to visit Skanderborg at a later date. Therefore, after dodging a tent or two, we headed northwest to Silkeborg, enjoying the beautiful countryside (see below) and the multiple lakes that exist between the two towns.



Lilja especially enjoyed the scenery, as shown below:



When we got to Silkeborg, we discovered a festival of some type that seemed to be related to rowing and/or drinking beer.



We spent some time watching the boat races and eating a snak and then walked around a bit. During our brief walk, we ran into the (unfortunately closed) Silkeborg museum.



However, the true jewel of the day was Silkeborg's paper museum whose description I must delay to the next post (since its way past my bedtime). Then, I will have to find time to blog about Tivoli, our day at the beach, Max and Lilja's school (synopsis: "They love it!"), and Ilene's second trip to Copenhagn! (I wish life would take a break, so I could catch up in my task of documenting it.)

Stay tuned!

Ken