Down on the Farm!!!

We caught the ferry early on the 26th from near Roskilde to Århus, which was about a 3 hour trip. Pretty boring, but Heidi made us a packed lunch so we were occupied with that for a while. lucky because the ferry food was SO expensive, for a cup of chips it was $9!! We arrived and were picked up by Flemming, another of Dave's families trainees, who then drove us to his parents place for another traditional Danish meal!! Over Xmas they eat the same thing for like 3 days!! i don't know why or how they do it because we were getting pretty sick of it, but each place was slightly different so it was OK. We had 4 courses of herring, pork, various salads and breads, salmon, liver (yuk!) and more schnapps and special Xmas beer!!!

After lunch (at about 4pm!!) we headed out to his farm. It is such a nice old farm, nothing like we have back at home. The farm house was build in the 1860's and the newest of the farm building was from the 1930's!! It was really cool! we didn't do much that evening as we were pretty tired from all the travel (his place is about an hour away from the ferry port).

The next day we got a sleep in which was very much needed!! we got up and had the full danish breakfast which involved a lot of bread and cheese and strong coffee!! we got the grand tour of the farm then (its a boy thing!!). he has about 300 pigs which were still fairly young, so they were cute but the stinkiest creatures i have even known!! we only looked into the pig yard for about 20 seconds and that was enough!! we checked out the cows, his farm is a dairy farm which supplies milk to one of the large cheese manufacturer in Denmark which exports throughout Europe. He has a cool new automatic milking machine which means he doesn't have to go milking every morning and evening. for those of you in the know, its a pretty awesome thing, and for those of you who don't know, it is the best piece of equipment a dairy farmer could ask for!! basically the cows milk themselves, he doesn't need to be there at all! There was a couple of really young calves, less than a week old, and they were so cute and so tame, you could pat them. it was pretty cool.

We climbed up the grain silo and got a fantastic view of the whole county which was excellent, then we went and saw the horses (the highlight for me!!). Flemming also grows Xmas trees which supply Germany, Denmark and France (he has heaps!!!) so we went and saw those as well. Then on the way back to the farmhouse we stopped and checked out his neighbours barn. Turns out it is the oldest barn in Denmark and was built over 400 years ago!! It was in use up until about 20 years ago, and now it is used as storage for old farm equipment and stuff. it was really cool, the doorways were all really short so people were obviously much shorter than us back then!! all the original oak wooden beams are still intact as well. it was pretty awesome.

In the afternoon we drove down to Randers which is their closest large town and after stopping in at the Volkswagen dealer to check if their new car had arrived (lucky then jealous us!!) we went to the shopping centre for a coffee (much needed!) and to try some local danish sweets (delicious!!).

after cruising around there we went into the middle part of the city for dinner at a Mexican restaurant. it was great as they were sick of danish food as well after everything they had at Xmas! walking to the restaurant was gorgeous, think rundle mall type situation, but cobbled streets, darkness (of course!), Xmas lights strung up everywhere, more than one mall and old style buildings and you can start to get an idea of how gorgeous this place was. as it was an unexpected trip, we didn't have our camera with us (very disappointed) so we cant show you photo, but will do our best to describe it when we get home!

This morning was very difficult as not only did we have to say goodbye to our fabulous hosts Flemming, his wife Lena and their 6 year old Amelie, we also had to get up at 6am to drive an hour into the train station, catch a train for 4 hours into the airport, fly an hour to Stockholm, have the airline lose our luggage and the get to our hotel!!! so we arrived at our hotel in Stockholm (which is fabulous!!) at around 4pm, checked in and then watch an hour of ER to recuperate!! we headed out on a walk around the city to suss it all out, grabbed dinner at T.G.I. Fridays (good old American burgers!!). now its almost 9:30pm and we are buggered!!