Well, we made it back alive and with some change in our pockets!

We drove out on Tuesday, July 8th and made our way 4 hours north of us, to the lovely border town to Denmark...Flensburg, Germany. We stayed in a small local hotel...just enough room for the 4 of us, literally. We did not arrive to the hotel until close to 9:30 PM so we just needed a place to stay for the night. The breakfast was included in the morning and it was pretty good. We had another 3 hours to drive on Wednesday to check into our hotel in Copenhagen, Denmark. The girls were getting really excited to see their Oma and Opa, since they had not seen them since March. We arrived and checked into The Carlton Hotel Guldsmeden. I really shopped around for deals and I think I found one with this place. It was a 4 star hotel and we paid a lot less, but w/o breakfast, darn!

Since we knew that Denmark and Sweden were going to be VERY expensive (and it was!), we did our best to try to save a dollar here and there by grocery shopping and packing breakfast and lunch when we could. When we arrived, we wanted to rush to meet Ann and Frank so we had not gone to the grocery store yet. So we decided to grab a bite to eat at a local cafe. We ordered 2 sandwiches, 2 beers and 2 milks, since we were going to share it between the 4 of us...we spent $40 US dollars on this meal!! That is when we realized we were definitely going to find a grocery store!!!

We caught up with Ann and Frank and we walked to Copenhagen's historic Tivoli Gardens. It has been open for over 160 years, has beautiful gardens, summer concerts, a ton of restaurants and many roller coaster rides for little and big kids. Addison had a blast!! Later on Wednesday, we walked through the world’s largest and longest street of shops, Stroget Street. Then Ann and Frank left for their Baltic Cruise. We were very happy to have seen them, even if it was just for a day!

We ended up fitting a lot in the short period of time we had there. Some of the other stuff we did was:

• A canal tour of the area. BEAUTIFUL! We sat with a retired couple that was from Boston and now lived in the Caribbean and was starting their Baltic Cruise later that day.
• Addison was super excited that she got to see the Little Mermaid, although she is just a statue in the harbor.
• Walked up the Rundetarn (The Round Tower), built in 1642 as an astronomical observatory. Whew, that was tall.
• Our last day in Denmark, Friday, was spent driving to north Denmark and visiting 3 castles.

The first of the three castles and the most BEAUTIFUL castle that we did not go inside (but I must go see again before we come home) was the Frederiksborg Palace and Gardens. I have attached an areal view of the castles gardens below. We walked through the huge palace gardens and had lunch in the middle of these beautiful gardens. Once we have the pictures uploaded I will add the picture in this blog. I think we thought the other 2 castles were going to be equally as beautiful...nope. They were nice and I am glad we went, but we both wished we would have went inside the first one. The other 2 smaller castles were the Frederborg Slot and the Kronborg Slot. These were all on our round trip journey from Copenhagen to Sweden.

 

After we drove north, we took a Scandlines ferry from Helsingor, Denmark over the Baltic Sea and landed at Helsingborg, Sweden. This only too 20 minutes! WOW, and that is all up to Friday!