copenhagen

Of the northern places that we’ve recently visited, Iceland, Norway, and Denmark, Copenhagen is my favorite. Not much bigger than Oslo, it’s vibrant and full of activity. Part of this may be the close and easy travel connection to Sweden where taxes are higher resulting in Swedes doing a lot of shopping in Copenhagen, and part of it may be the people themselves. I’d have to spend more time there to be sure. The prices were not as high as we’d expected, so we were able to enjoy the wonderful food. Everything was fresh and the amounts and varieties of fish were endless. I didn’t eat much of it because I’m supposed to avoid smoked things while I’m pregnant, but everything that Paul ordered looked and smelled fantastic. The sauces are the real treat combining spices that are familiar but in exotic ways. I enjoyed their danishes immensely; the pastry is like flaked butter.
a canal street in the nyhaven neighborhood

We took the advice of our friends Gabe and Mark and rented bicycles on our second day, which allowed us to cover a large portion of the city centre in detail. We even re-visited places like the statue of the little mermaid, trying to catch the light just right. The city has bikes available for free use. They are locked up like grocery carts. You put in 20 kroner and the lock opens. There are racks all over to replace them and retrieve your 20 kroner. The downside is that the bikes are pretty primitive and must stay within the city centre. We originally planned to take them up the coast about 12 km, so we rented two from our hotel for only 10 pounds each. These bikes were still fairly basic, but by the end of the day we really appreciated the small benefits such as three speeds and rubber hand grips. Other than Amsterdam, I’ve never seen a city so bike friendly. Most of the roads have wide bike lanes and the busier intersections have lights especially for the bikes.
the little mermaid

On our first day, we walked into Christiania, a hippy community where no one owns any of the flats and no one pays rent. It’s a controversial area as it’s in the center of Copenhagen on prime real estate, and the rest of the Danes pay exorbitant taxes and rent. We returned the next day on the bikes and cycled all over it. The homes range from nice waterside holiday cottages to boxcars and tin sheds.
christiania

On our last day, we took a train out of the city to the Louisiana Modern Art Museum. It sits on the coast, and there are sculptures scattered all over the lush garden. Once outside the city, trees and large homes dominate the flat countryside.
louisiana art museum

I’ve started back to work, and time is moving swiftly again. I have a class of eighth graders this year, a new experience for me. I have to shift my timelines with them drastically. What I can teach to ninth graders in a lesson, I must plan for three lessons for them. They aren’t dumb; they are just used to having every step mapped out for them. I’ll be holding a lot of hands this semester. Good practice!

I can feel the baby move on the inside every night now and sometimes during the day. We go in for a scan on Monday, and if the baby is facing the right way, we’ll learn the gender. Then begins the discussion of names, which we’ve hardly addressed. I continue to feel great with only a little issue with my food allergies. I so hope the baby doesn’t inherit this. Paul is the perfect father-to-be. He takes good care of me without being smothering or condescending. My happiness continues to grow as does my belly.

a beach and a castle

Taking advantage of the sunny weather, we drove south to Birling Gap on the fourth and stopped at Hever Castle on the way home. It seems the rain has finally stopped.

Walking the beach in England isn’t like walking the beach in other places – no sand. It’s nice not to have the grit in my shoes but the stones don’t create a tranquil atmosphere. The stones are the size of a child’s fist and smooth like the kind that people use for boarders in their gardens. The tide was low and children were finding all kinds of treasures in the pools.

We didn’t stay on the beach long but drove a little up the coast, waked to the edge of the white cliffs just like in Dover, viewed a picturesque lighthouse at Beachy Head, then walked inland a short distance to a great pub where we enjoyed lunch with a view of the sea.


Hever Castle is the ancestral home of Anne Boleyn. It has a section built in the 1200’s that looks like a castle with a moat and portcullis, and a newer section built in the Tudor style around the 1500’s. It was purchased by the Astor family in the 19th century and furbished luxuriantly.



The grounds are particularly nice with hedge and water mazes, an Italian garden, and a lake. It’s located close to Gatwick airport and about an hour from home.

colorado

I’m back in London after a three week luxury holiday at my parents’ place with just a little over a week to go before work starts again. Paul came over for the first two weeks, and I stayed for an extra week of pampering and indulgence. Staying at Mom and Dad’s is better than a five star resort because it comes with a choice of cars, a stocked fridge, a beautiful garden, and cocktail hour with people with whom we don’t have to engage in small talk but can have lively conversation instead. This was Paul’s first trip to Colorado in the summer, and the heat wave gave him a good taste of high plains desert living.

Just one of our automobile choices. This is Dad's latest toy.

First on the list was flying lessons for Paul. He did an hour in a Cessna and then an hour in Dad’s Bonanza. It was gratifying to see him return from his flights with his shirt soaked in sweat because this is how I return from every flight lesson. It’s exciting and wonderful, but intense. I opted out of lessons for this trip as my pregnancy has me feeling a strong aversion to stress, even if it’s good.


On 2 July, Paul and I ran some errands around Fort Collins, including a stop at the municipal building to get married. The clerk was friendly and the whole process blissfully easy. Within an hour, we were married and had the license to prove it. We looked into getting married in the UK but found too many obstacles. The wedding will be in four or five years, in Cape Town, so start planning now. We’ll let you know well in advance.


Dad flew the four of us to Yellowstone for two nights. When I was there two summers ago in July, I woke every morning to frost on the ground. Not this time. The heat was surprising, especially bad when added to the steam around the thermal stuff. That just gave us an excuse to indulge in ice cream. We watched a small black bear stroll out of the woods, across the parking lot, and to some berry bushes near Tower Falls. It wasn’t interested in the people at all.

The park is majestic and glorious. We visited most of the highlights in our short stay, and I look forward to going back for more.



Our next stop was the Eagle’s Roost, my parents’ cabin in the Colorado Rockies. Finally, I was home, and I did all the things that I love: fishing, napping, sitting on the porch, fishing, driving around the association looking for wild life in the ‘Thang,’ walking, sitting on the porch… Of all the places I’ve traveled, this is the one place I want to re-visit again and again. We were able to escape from the extreme heat. Mom and Dad still spend most of their time up there working, and it shows. The flowers are artfully arranged on the hillside, the grass is kept cut for easier walking, and the trail along the creek is well covered in wood chips and free of overhanging limbs. We stayed four nights, and then went up for one more night after Paul returned to the UK.




Dad surprised us with a train ride through the Royal Gorge. We flew down to Canyon City, rode the train up and back down the Gorge, and were back in Fort Collins by 15:00. What a life!

the cotswold's

I’m looking down the calendar at the end of the school year and our holiday in Colorado, and Paul’s scheduled all kinds of weekend outings to help make the time pass even more quickly. We spent last Saturday night in the Cotswold’s soaking up the slow and relaxing English countryside. Just two and a half hours from London, and we were sleeping in a farmhouse B&B surrounded by fields of rye, hillside meadows with sheep, and geese cackling in the yard next door.
We spent Saturday in Broadway surrounded by honey-colored stone buildings and Sunday walking on a public footpath through fields of emerald green grass. On our walk, we passed through a storybook hamlet called Laverton, the archetypal English village. I expected to see Winnie the Pooh or Peter Rabbit around every bend even though they are from different counties altogether. The profusion of roses both domestic and wild are astonishing this time of year, and the air was heavy with their heady scent.

reykjavik

Our plane left the runway in London at 9:30, dark enough for the city to be a crown of lights with twilight quickly turning to night. Within in minutes, we were above the clouds and back into full sun. Our flight was three hours, and we landed with the sky turning the clouds red with the sunset. It was light enough at 12:30 when we went to bed that we had to make sure the curtains were pulled tight, all the seams closed. I have no idea how early the sun came up, but it was high in the sky by the time I was awake. Being able to make use of so much daylight after work is appealing, but I found it confusing when the light at 23:30 was what I’m used to seeing about the time I eat dinner. In a month or so, they will have weeks with no night.

Reykjavik is even smaller and less populated than Oslo, and we again experienced the feeling of being in a ghost town. It was relaxing to be away from the rush of cars and crush of people.

We spent our first day walking around the city, visiting the church that dominates the skyline, the geothermal storage towers with a viewing platform and revolving restaurant on top, and eating a highly recommended hot dog from a stand in the city center next to a flea market with an impressive fish market selling puffin eggs that are so colorful there is no need to decorate them at Easter.


We knew Iceland was expensive, so we made good use of the breakfast included with our room, then bought dinner at the supermarket. We had a cup of noodles each and improvised spoons from crackers until they disintegrated and then used stir sticks from the coffee service in the room.


On our second day, we joined a bus tour of the countryside where we viewed a geothermal plant from a distance, walked through the mid-Atlantic rift where North America and Europe are slowly being pulled apart, meandered around the area where the first and longest standing democratic assembly was formed, stood between the drops of a two-tiered waterfall, watched a geyser erupt every eight minutes or so, and gazed into the blue waters in the bottom of a volcanic crater.

The land on the entire drive was a vast plain of ancient lava covered in springy moss and hills mottled in golds, oranges, and reds from the heat under the ground. It was stunning scenery. When Iceland was first discovered, it was heavily forested and there is a reforestation program in progress, but it’s slow going.


We spent a few hours at the Blue Lagoon thermal pool before going to the airport on our last day. The blue-green milky water stood in stark contrast to the black surrounding lava, just as the warmth of the water contrasted with the chilly weather. Upon entering, the water is the temperature of a warm bath, but as we moved around the pool, a couple of acres in size, we discovered areas that felt like a hot bath to temperatures too warm for me to tolerate. We smeared silicon on our face and joined the other people for ten minutes of mud until it dried and we wiped it off. There seemed to be an even mix of foreign tourists and local Icelanders in the pool. Paul and I laughed when a loud woman with an distinct accent yelled at her husband to not put his glasses there or he’d lose them and another tourist paddling past us said, “I’m guessing she’s from New York.”

What we saw of Iceland was remarkable, and I recommend making a stop there on your next trip to or from Europe to the States.

dover

Along with seeing as much of Europe as we can while we have the handy hub of Heathrow nearby, we’re also trying to take in some of England. A few weeks ago, we spent a day in Kent with stops at Dover, Sandwich, and Canterbury. As our Lonely Planet says, the city of Dover isn’t worth the trip, but the walk along the cliffs was a perfect way to spend one of the first really warm weekends of the year.

We didn’t visit the castle, but we drove around it and viewed it from the cliffs. It’s an impressive structure, set just a little way off of the white cliffs and surrounded by green countryside. Some kind of crop was in bloom, Paul thinks rapeseed, making the scene even more stunning. Our walk along the cliff tops took us past a large field of the flowers, which smell like honey. We met many friendly walkers on our two mile stroll to a lighthouse and back.

From Dover, we drove north to Sandwich for a lunch of …fish and chips. This village has a nice old center of meandering narrow cobble stone streets that we walked before getting in the car and taking the scenic country route to Canterbury. I was impressed with how rural England can be. We walked around the walled medieval city and had a cup of coffee before heading home. It was a great day trip, and I hope to do more of these over the summer.

Oslo

We took advantage of the bank holiday last Monday and spent the long weekend in Oslo. This was my first visit to Scandinavia. My first impression was of the airport, which looked just as I expected, all steel and blonde wood and glass like an Ikea store. Our bus to the city was easy to find and ran on time like all the transportation that we took while there. It’s a smooth running country. We noticed that everyone on the motorway seemed to be driving at a reasonable speed and with plenty of space between cars. We saw no traffic violations nor heard any loud mufflers or horn honking the entire weekend. Norway is a few weeks behind England in weather, so we got to see the sweet green of new leaves and tulips as tall as irises. The hills were a lovely contrast of the dark needles of the pine trees and the light leaves of what I think were mostly elms. There was rain and mist intermittently that made the scene even more charming. I would have appreciated gloves and a hat at times, but we managed the cold with frequent stops in cafes.


The locals sat outdoors under blankets provided by the restaurants. Many had overhead heaters as well. The greater Oslo area has around 750,000 people, and after London’s crush, we found it eerily quiet. We’d read that Norwegians love recreation in the outdoors and thought the city might fill on Monday. There were a few more cars and people, but it was still quiet by comparison. We visited the most popular tourist attraction, the Olympic ski jump, which can be seen from the city. We took the metro there. Within five stops, we were out of the city and climbing the hills into suburbia. The homes are a bit of a cross between Swiss chalets and Romanian villas, like gingerbread houses without the gingerbread. There were crowds of mountain bikers getting on the train after what looked to be a day of riding in the mud. The advertisements and route maps for the metro are not affixed to the walls of the train so that people with muddy pants can unhook the posters from the wall and sit on them to protect the cloth seats. So civilized.


While we were at the top of the ski jump, it started to rain and even a few flakes of snow fell. The view of the city and fjord are worth the trip and the climb of about 50 stairs. We also took a two hour boat ride down the Oslo fjord with commentary in English and German and blankets. Oslo’s expensive so we didn’t do many things that included an entrance fee, but we did go to the resistance museum inside the castle. We tried to go to the Munch museum, but found it closed after a longish walk to get there. The Scream hasn’t been returned yet anyway.



We spent the warmest and sunniest day in a statue park with hundreds of human statues engaged in every imaginable activity all by the same sculptor. Our hotel was located fairly close to City Hall where the Nobel Prize is awarded. I don’t feel a pressing need to return to Oslo, but I think seeing some of the natural beauty of western Norway would be nice.