Connection is the Whole Point

Connection is he whole point, said Berit, which I agree with. Which sentiment she may have even gotten from me at some point in time, though I can't claim to be the only person in her life who holds that view.  But we spent our week connecting with others.

On Monday night, Gwen  showed up with Rowan (2) and Jade, ages six and two. Griffin and I took a night walk on the beach with them. Upon entering the beach, we found a crowd lining a path from a sea turtle nest to the ocean. We might have stayed and watched the event, but when the sea turtles would hatch was unclear, and we're just not what you'd call patient people. So we walked the beach, following a couple with a high intensity flashlight spotting 3-inch wide hermit crabs. I flicked one and it bolted for Griffin's feet, making him scream like a 15-year-old boy.

We played in the surf and sand on Tuesday. Crazy wind and waves and we we found ourselves in a rip current being pulled outward. We dug for coquinas, pulled them out of the sand and dropped hem back on it to watch them dig their way out of sight.  I napped for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and in the evening Gwen put the girls to bed early. We got make your own pizzas at Lowes.

Wednesday morning we hung with Gwen and the girls as they got ready to head out on the road o Connecticut. Rowan continued to help Griffin with the 550 piece jigsaw puzzle. After they took off, we spent a little time at the beach before heading down to Calabash to eat fried shrimp at The Seafood Hut. As John F-D told me, "Failure to eat fried shrimp in Calabash borders on criminal activity."

Thursday was our big day. In the two weeks prior to this vacation, Griffin was in a theater camp. The show was Legally Blonde, and G and his opposite, Risa, ended up dating. Well, the show ended on a Friday night, and on Saturday, Risa and Griffin were each bound for family vacations.... Both on the North Carolina coast.

So yesterday, we drove to Southport to catch the ferry over to Bald Head Island where Risa's family is spending he week. This is the part where we decide that connection is the mos important thing and, rather than burrow ourselves more deeply in the sand, we take the opportunity to spend a day with a family we've never met.

Ocean Isle Beach, Day One

I'm too tired for this. I should be writing in the morning. That's the only time that works for me. Instead, here I am trying to fill minutes as I drink my tea and wait for Berit and Griffin to come back from getting ice cream. Rowan is not doing sugar, and I am supporting her in that by also not doing sugar. Mostly. This isn't easy, but it is likely the best thing for me. There is agave in my tea, and I just ate a handful of cherries, so it's practically ice cream anyway.

Ocean Isle Beach is the sleepiness beach town on the face of North Carolina. One of the southernmost points on the Outer Banks, Ocean Isle is a stone's throw from its polar opposite across the South Carolina border - Myrtle Beach, which I imagine we'll visit sometime this week to mix it up.

We got in yesterday, utterly wrecked from the red eye from Colorado. Intact after about eight hours of sleep-deprived travel, we fell into our beds and slept into he mid-afternoon when I got up and persuaded Griffin to leave his laptops to walk to the beach with me.

"Think about the ocean, Dad. Billions of years old with all the creatures that have lived in it during all that time. Do you think it's more ocean or more pee?"'

Griffin and I go back and wake the girls before heading out for an epic food shopping spree at Walmart. It was a mistake. There's a Lowes Foods closer, but somehow I've mistakenly goten it into my head that we have o go to Walmart to shop. It took us at least an hour and a half, but we got out of here with a bunch of staples for the week, headed back to 47 Anson Srreet and ate pizza.

Today was a beach day. We swam, rode waves, played a little ocean Marco Polo, and walked the strand. Griffin became obsessed with finding the telltale air bubbles beneath the receding waves and digging up a hermit crab.Then he noticed one of the birds with a small clam and realized that it was clams that they were chasing beneath the sand. We became fascinated with digging these coquinas up and then putting them back on the sand to watch them burrow back underground with their invisible foot. Six of these - Butthole, Butthole Junior, Jethro, Clem, Goldilocks and (unnamed) came back to Anson Street with us to die in a block of hardened sand in an Altoids tin.

Tonight I bought a pound of roadside shrimp which we ate with quesadillas. 

Early Lessons Today - Snow, Isogashii

I'm up this morning at the clomp clomping of boots and the slamming of Evol burrito microwave door. I check the watch; it's 6:30. So I go out into the kitchen in my underwear.

Griffin is up and getting ready to head out to walk to the bus stop. Greg doesn't have a period one class this semester, and so he's not giving Griffin a ride to school. Griffin tells me he stayed up until midnight reading his book (Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson). Pam and I spent years throwing books at Griffin and missing and along comes Ms. Gance, nailing him in one shot. I tell Griffin I'm giving him a ride.

7:05 am: First lesson of the day.

Even if you aren't going anywhere, wipe that pile of snow off of your windshield, because if you don't it will freeze in the sun there, and when it's time to take Griffin to school the following morning, you will be faced with trying to remove and de-ice those shenanigans without the aid of an ice scraper, because you gave that to Rowan.

I start the car and put the defrost on full blast, find an old license plate under my workbench and proceed to scrape the crustified snow off. I come into the kitchen and Griffin is just standing there.

"What are you doing?" I ask him. "You could at least be making your lunch." He points to the teapot.

"I"m making hot water to pour on the windshield." Smart kid. Griffin pours the tea water on the windshield, works like a charm, and we're out.

7:40 am: Second lesson of the day.

People are too busy and in too much of a hurry. As I'm driving back from Griffin's school, this guy pulls around me fast to cut back in right in front of me so that he could turn right in just a few hundred feet. I swear he saved .001 of a second doing that, and I know he felt like an idiot because he kind of waved sheepishly at me after having done it. I avoid my impulse to pull into the King Soopers parking lot after him to inquire as to the nature of his problem, choosing instead to ruminate on it myself.

My favorite thing about studying Japanese were the written characters. It's pretty complex, having three separate character sets - hiragana, katakana, and kanji - but also really cool. The kanji are pictorial characters that came from Chinese, and you can sometimes see in them their etymological origins. The Japanese character (kanji) for "busy" is isogashii. When you look at its component characters, isogashii literally means "to lose one's heart." When I'm busy, I lose my heart. Boom. Right?

So I try to bear that in mind. I make time to take Griffin to school if I can, and when I come home, I take some time to make Rowan and I some eggs and toast. When Berit wakes up late in the morning and I'm here working, I stop for a few to talk or stretch with her. I'm grateful to my company for allowing me to work from home. They've made this possible for me to do my job and still be present for the kids. That's my real work. I also prioritize things like exercise, meditation, and  yeah, writing. This is how I'm taking care of myself, and today I'm recommitting to daily writing. We'll see how it goes.

Hello Copenhagen, Goodbye Copenhagen. Hello London, Goodbye London.

On Thursday, after finishing with the cleaning and packing, we began our long journey home. We met Karsten's brother Lars at the Middelfart bus stop after some anxiety about whether we were in the right place or not. Middelfart is the halfway point for the trip between Aarhus and Copenhagen so there were just enough seats for us, with Griffin riding shotgun, by the bus door and beneath the coffee pot.  

I spent the journey talking with a gregarious Dane (an anomaly) named Ida (AY-da) who had spent five years in the States on a soccer scholarship. She struck up a conversation after observing me eating a sandwich and potato chips ("so American"). She and her girlfriend, who were headed from their home in Aarhus for a long weekend in Copenhagen, talked with me at length about Denmark and the Danish people. 

In Copenhagen, Pam and Rowan trained to Norrebro for some shopping and coffee shop reading (respectively) while Berit, Griffin and I dabbed to our AirBNB apartment on the canal, another spacious, gorgeous flat.  

All that talking on the bus really took it out of me but I mustered the energy to head across to the street to the Fiskatorvet mall with the kids. Berit and Griffin got drinks at the Baresso, but I had to get out of there pretty quickly. 

We walked about 30 minutes into the centrum to meet Pam and Rowan at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek art museum. Griffin's opinion on the matter was that one art museum this trip was enough, but Berit was positive about the venture (generously so). 

Man Ray, Egyptian mummies and hieroglyphs, and French masters, all of which we fairly ran through. The kids stayed to play chess at the Man Ray exhibit while We foraged for dinner at Central Station. 

Our cabbie back to the flat, Søren, was a friendly, older Dane who we enjoyed talking with and who agreed to pick us up at 5 am Friday morning to take us to the airport. Everybody caught at least a few winks on the two hour flight to London and, after going through passport control and customs, we wended our way (speedily, via the Heathrow Express) to our Marylebone (75 Lisson Grove, Earls Court 16) flat, dumped our belongings and hit the streets. 

We nourished ourselves on coffees and pasties (oh ye delicious Cornwall pasties!) before making for Carnaby Street, Picadilly and other Soho destinations. We wound around through London, splitting up again as the girls headed to Cath Kitston and Griffin and I to Picadilly where he was pulled into some improv by a beat-boxing, saxophone-playing busker. Griffin and I wound our way through Charing Cross, through the book shops and down to Trafalger where we met the girls at Nelson's Column.

We cooled off and rested our feet in the Waterstones bookstore there. Pam bought a couple of YA books for her and Rowan. We walked down Whitehall, past the Cavalry where the changing of the guard occurs, past Westminster Abbey and across the Thames at Vauxhall Bridge (I think), turned and promenades along the Thames back up past the London Eye, leaning at the South Bank Centre where we fed ourselves among a throng enjoying various street food and music at the South Bank Love Festival. 

After 13 hours on their feet, everyone was pretty over all the walking. We took the Baker Line tube from Waterloo Station back to Marylebone. It's 6:45 a.m. It's Saturday, and we have a flight at 3 p.m.  Our idea is to hit the Portabello Market this morning, which was an absolute carnival when we found it here two years ago. We'll have to be back here at noon, collect our things and head off to Paddington Station to catch the Heathrow Express back to the airport for our 3 p.m. flight home What a long, incredible trip it's been. 

The North Sea, Gorilla Park, Riding in Romo and Jurassic World

Saturday and Sunday, July 4 and 5 - The North Sea

Pam and I get up and bike down to our beach at Høl again before any of the kids are up. I swim, and She does beach yoga. Pam also makes and leaves these fairie mandalas at every opportunity. 

We buy sugar snap peas at the roadside stand on the way home. We would have bought jordbaer as well, but there will be plenty to pick from our garden, plus the jordbaer jam that Tanja has in the refrigerator. Homemade. 

We drove to Jutland's West coast on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday we were at Henne, a beautiful expanse of beach chock full of Danes and Germans. Rowan, Griffin and I played in the water, Berit read her book on the beach, and Pam and I walked the strand as usual. We only saw one naked family. Rowan and Griffin and I finished with some hacky-sack.

The beach town in Henne is cute. We got ice creams and everyone read their books. I got licorice ice cream (lakrids). Have I mentioned the Danish love affair with licorice yet? Licorice everything. I'm really going to miss it.

After a failed attempt to get into Vejle's Gorilla Park we once again made for the West Coast - this time to Ringkobing and Hvide Sand (White Sand). It took a while, but we found the parkour park in Ringkobing. 

By the time we hit the beach at Hvide Sand, the skies were dark, thunder boomed in the distance and apocolyptic gulls circled in swarms, swooping down to feast on the small jellyfish. 

Rowan  and Griffin were in the water, Griffin scooping up jellyfish and throwing them to the gulls. I dove in also as Pam combed the beach for rocks. She was like a North Sea mystic with big headphones vaned draped in towels, walking through the rain, collecting talismans. 

Beriit, engrossed in her book, never left the car, and was none to upset about it when we all came scurrying over the dunes in the downpour.

Monday - Gorilla Park

We showed up at Gorilla Park at noon and our group assembled for instruction - first in Danish and then in English. We secured our harnesses with locking caribiners and zip-line accessories and were off - first on the practice course and then into courses one through six.

Each course took us a little higher, across traverses that were incrementally higher, scarier and more challenging. The kids were off by themselves on course 4. I finished course 3 with Pam, and then we skipped to course 5 to avoid the line. 

How high were we? I don't know - 50 feet? There were some pretty scary obstacles, like the one where you have to jump on a snowboard and surf to the next tree. 

We all had a blast and finished the evening in Vejle's downtown area. More ice creams and a candy store that had a Willie Wonka-sized selection of licorice.

Tuesday - Horseback Riding in Romo

On the island of Romo we rode Icelandic horses through forested dunes. I giggled like a little girl as I bounced maniacally through the never-ending trotting. 

Towards the end of our two hour journey, it began to rain. Afterwards, we thought we'd find Sonderstrand, a Romo beach popular with naked German tourists. Instead, we found this vast expanse of sand that Pam insisted was the beach at low tide. Only Rowan would set off with us across the barren sands, kicking the soccer ball.

Wednesday - Jurrasic World

Today was a rain day. After mailing our postcards, buying dinner and stopping by our bakery for coffee and breakfast pastries, we made a spur of the moment decision to pile in the Berlingo and speed off for the movie theater in Vejle. We made it just in time to enjoy our tradition of going to see Chris Pratt movies on rainy days during our vacation (last year it was Guardians of the Galaxy in Massachusetts).

We cleaned the house and the car. Tomorrow, we head to Middelfart to catch a bus to Copenhagen. The journey home begins.

Roskilde Festival and Vikings in Sweden

Thursday - July 2, Roskilde Festival

I've never been to a music festival - no Lollapalooza, no Bonaroo. The closest I've come is three days of Grateful Dead shows in Las Vegas the year that Jerry Garcia died. That's my benchmark.

The Roskilde Festival in Roskilde, Denmark is Northern Europe's largest musical festival. It takes place over the course of eight full days with musical performances on six main stages and multiple sub-stages throughout that time. A huge expanse of land is taken over with rows upon rows of campsites filling up much of it, and by the time we hit Roskilde, three days prior to the festival's final day, this area was a quagmire of garbage, piss, and drunken youth. 

However, once we walked into the festival proper, everything was pristine, well-maintained, and chock full of things to do. There were multiple art spaces, dj spaces, a maker area, graffiti zone, and more stores, stalls, stands and windows selling food, drink, clothing, and sundry souvenirs than you could ever possibly want to see.

It's like a hundred Grateful Dead shows all wrapped up into one big orange party.

The day began for us at the Gloria Stage, an inside venue where at 10:30 a.m. we packed in with the rest of the early risers for the sing-along. A whole slew of Danes as well as a variety of other Europeans and us singing Beatles, Pete Seeger("God Bless the Grass"), Simon & Garfunkel, etc. led by an excellent Danish combo that included a stand-up bass and an accordion, and the English words projected above the band. 

That was a lot of fun. We made Gloria stage our "lost person" meeting place, as it had an large open-air outer room filled with couches - shade and comfort in a central location.

The day was filled with activities and musical acts. Florence + The Machine and Muse, late that night, were highlights, but we also really enjoyed bands we hadn't known going in - Veronica Maggio, Sarabi, Jupiter & Okwess International, Mastodon and especially Ezra Furman, whose raspy voice and crazy energy made him something of a young Tom Waits (or Dexter Romweber, for my Chapel Hill peeps).

At the end of the night, the kids chilled in the Gloria couches, befriending a couple of young french women, Candice and her friend, who evidently fell in love with Rowan and Griffin. Pam and I spent some time at the Orange stage for Muse. 

We all met up at 11 pm and exited in true Stormagan fashion, forming a crazy train by grabbing hands and snaking through the Muse throng for the exits.

Did I mention that Roskilde was Rowan and Griffin's first concert and Berit's second? Pretty epic! It's all downhill after this.i

Friday, July 3 - Swedish Vikings

We awoke at our Roskilde Fjord-side cabin, packed up and headed out. In a little over an hour, we were crossing the Oresund Strait, the body of water that separates Denmark from Southern Sweden. The Oresund bridge/tunnel combination is nearly 8 kilometers long, the longest bridge in Europe. 

We landed in Malmo, Sweden and headed to a cafe in the diverse section of the city. Coffee Joint gets high marks for its service, its coffee drinks and especially its art.

From Malmo we headed down to Trelleborg, a small village on the Southern coast, for a Viking market. This took place at a Viking ring fortress built in 980 A.D. by Harold Bluetooth, son of Gorm the Old and inventor of Bluetooth wireless technology. 

The Viking market was populated by would-be Vikings from all across Europe. The first guy we spoke with was from Iceland. He showed us the leather he made from the skins of salmon and cod as well as a sort of bowl that was at one time the nutsack of a sheep. I kid you not.

I also spoke with an older Swedish woman, a fiber artist who made decorated woolen belts not unlike the ones the kids learned to make with Amelia in Lejre, but with more complex designs. And I had a long conversation with a Swedish Viking named Thor Bjorrn (Thor's Bear) who makes ancient furniture and let me check out his comfy-looking tent.

We watched a Viking battle and a Viking wedding as we enjoyed our usual picnic lunch. And then we left, enjoying walking through the streets of Trelleborg, and stopping at a candy store where we bought some Swedish fish (though in Sweden, they're just called fish).

Den Gamle By, SUP, and a Road-trip to Roskilde

Have I mentioned the licorice? In Denmark, it's "lakrids" which is (roughly) pronounced the same, and the Danes love it. Every store has multiple varieties of licorice to choose from in various forms. At the Roskilde Festival, I could have gotten chicken marinated in licorice. I have a bag of licorice potato chips that the kids won't touch, and tonight, much to their chagrin, the soft ice cream pops had a licorice shell and a licorice center.

Other differences besides the preponderance of licorice include the fact that the Danes are extremely quiet people - particularly on public transportation, but pretty much everywhere, they are quieter than us. And when I say "us," I mean our family. We're pretty much the loudest people in Denmark right now.

And they are pretty unabashed when it comes to public urination.

And it's light all the time here, but besides all those things Denmark is exactly like America.

Tuesday, June 30 - Den Gamle By and Stand-Up Paddle-Boarding

The problem with this adventure being such a packed whirlwind is that I don't take the opportunity to write things down. And then I forget out stuff. And when that happens, I pretty much just have to hit the highlights.

On Tuesday, we trekked back up to Aarhus, where we went to Den Gamle By, an open air museum where they've gathered something like 75 historic buildings from all over Denmark to create a realistic historical Danish town. 

Afterwards, we headed over to the LYNfabbriken art center and the surrounding area of galleries and cafes that feed the artist population of an art school there. After grabbing ritual caffeine, we settled into a grassy area and ate our usual lunch of cheeses and meets atop good bread before splitting up. 

Yes, Pam and I bid the teenagers adieu, as they walked off into Aarhus's concrete jungle. We were just two, before Pam lost me with her quick pace through gallery row, and I headed off to Aarhus's only English language bookstore.

We rendez-voused in time to make our 4:30 appointment down at the harbor for stand-up paddle-boarding (SUP). SurfAgency appears to operate out of a van down there (low overhead), and Finja and Michael do a great job at getting us outfitted and on the water with ease. 

We paddle past the many boats in the harbor, advised to pay attention to the jellyfish. The white / transparent ones are harmless; it's the red ones with the tentacles that can be meters in length that we need to watch out for. So we do. 

Actually none of swim, except for Rowan - very briefly, at the end of our journey. Despite my predilection for diving in the water, I don't want to test the potency of the jellyfish. We paddle and enjoy the scenery - the coastline, the Aarhus architecture and cathedral in the distance, the naked sunbathers on the pier.

Wednesday, July 1 - Lejre Experimental Archaelology Center

Road trip! On Wednesday, we headed East, out of Jutland, through Funen, and into Zealand, our destination - Roskilde, and the Roskilde Festival (www.roskilde-festival.dk) for which we held tickets for Thursday. 

We landed in Lejre (pronounced like "liar" with a Boston accent) to take in the Experimental Archaeology Center there (www.sagnlandet.dk) where, for the low low price of 125 kroner apiece, we got to experience ancient life in Denmark. Pam and I toured an Iron Age village and watched a ritual sacrifice; the kids rowed a wooden dug out canoe and weaved wool into decorative bands. We had an excellent time talking with Amelia there who, at 26 years old was back in school for some sort of fabric / textile arts communication degree.

We landed in Roskilde for dinner, walking the street mall there, where signs of the festival were present in the form of orange bean bags, orange couches, and orange cow statues. Oh, and inebriated young people (not orange, though). An older drunk turned to compliment Rowan ("You are very young, but you are very beautiful..."), who I brusquely cut-off, hurrying her along.

Twenty minutes from Roskilde was our Roskilde Fjord-side cabin. It got high points from the parents on design and cuteness, but low points from the kids for the lack of wifi and small floor mattresses for them. All in all, not a bad night of "roughing it" prior to festival day.