The cost to do business in Germany

........and by that I mean, the cost of doing one's "business" in Germany, since one has to pay to use the facilities at the travel plazas. I only wish I could have left the big one, so as to at least get my €.50 worth.


This is what you need...
Don't know why they go to the trouble of issuing a ticket, but I guess they want you to feel you've received some sort of value.
The washrooms were admittedly spotlessly clean, and I didn't leave a mess, although I was kind of tempted to at least leave a couple shit tickets on the floor. Just don't have it in me.
(note title of blog)

Here it is already Tuesday and I haven't really had much of a chance to sit down to write.
Good news is, when we got home Sunday night, our neighbour came over with a box she had signed for (what a sweetheart) and it was our wireless router from KPN.
Whoohoo!!
Got 'er hooked up that night!

So at least now I'm not having to sit in the cold over the garage to siphon someone's wireless. Mind you, it still seems to take a tad too long to upload images. Hm...


Oh well.

The weather in Denmark was fabulous. Cool at night, but that can be expected most anywhere in the northern hemishere.

Vejle is rather....charming, even though most of the harbour is taken up by shipping and such. It opens up to the Vejla fjord, which leads out to the North Sea.

The room was heaps better than the one in Belgium, and not that much more money, in spite of the fact that Denmark in general is pretty expensive. (didn't have to pay to take a dump though)
Had a nice view of the fjord.
Not sure about the huge rusty smoke stack. No point in asking at the front desk either I figured. Maybe some sort of geo-thermal related contraption? Did a nice job of blocking the view. So we took a little drive on Sunday for a couple different views of the fjord. Admittedly this first one could be most anywhere, but I just thought it was kind of neat. Bit of a steep grade to get down to this point. (12%)


Looking back towards Vejla.
Of course, once in a while you find things that are a little unexpected.










Saturday morning we completely slept in and ended up missing breakfast at the hotel, so decided to head out to see where we could get some coffee. Wasn't long before I was getting to the point where I was actually willing to go to the golden arches for whatever their version of coffee was.
What happens when you try to put such a place in a really old building is that, there's no place to sit, unless it's upstairs. No wheel chairs I guess. I took four of these, and none of them came out right. Probably just as well, since it was a pretty bleak dining area.
I need to apologize for even using the term "dining".

The things we do when we're desperate.

Once we had our coffee (it was barely adequate) we came to our senses and got the hell out of there.
The centre of Vejle on a Saturday morning was a bit frantic, and I'm not sure if I'll ever quite get used to the throngs. Hey, I don't shop at home on a Saturday, so I'm not too sure why the heck we keep ending up in these situations.
Once in a while though, there's something that makes it kind of worth while....


Huh??

On the Friday (don't you love the way we do these flashbacks?) I decided to wander into one of the grocery type stores called Fotex and made a "find"....so now we don't have to figure out a way to get this one sought after product from Stuttgart (or any other military base, for that matter)...


Seems there's a Kraft distributor in Denmark....who knew?
Actually, Fotex had a wide range of products, so I picked up some beer (Tuborg, like that's a stretch) and a couple bottles of Australian wine.....Each bottle of wine was the equivalent of about seven bucks! Something like DK 35,00 (danish kroners)
Dividing has never been one of my strengths, so having to divide by five to get a number I can relate to is a bit of a chore.
As an aside....on the subject of Danish.....I bought one of Friday...and it was superb! Never occured to me to take a picture, and it wasn't even with any sly intent that I bought the thing. I was hungry is all. The Danes have....well, ...great danishes.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled viewing...

In spite of the elation of having found Miracle Whip, I was in for a bit of a surprise when I came back out to the car to find I had got a ticket.

Now, for those of you who are fluent in Danish, you can easily see what a twit I was to have the audacity to park in their parking lot. All I got from it was something about customer parking, and even then I'm guessing....
Turns out you have to put out the little blue parking wheelie-who that shows when you got there....otherwise you get a DK 510 fine. (that's on the sign somewhere too...d'ya see it??)

I'm getting a little worked up just trying to spit this out.

See, in the Netherlands, and maybe everywhere else in the EU I guess, there are blue zones, where you put out the blue wheelie-who.

I didn't see any thing blue, except the air got a little blue.

I have 10 days to pay it. Like that's gonna happen. One guy Gabe talked to said he lived in Denmark for over a year and had quite a collection of these tickets and never paid a one. Not sure how they're going to collect from me....


Ok, I'm going to try and calm down now.....

Everyone to whom we mentioned that we might at some point end up in Denmark said, "oh, you gotta go to Lego Land!". So we drove over to Billund on Saturday,

and the closest we came to anything "lego....ish" was at the side of the road.

...because, we don't have a four year old, nor did we fancy going to a theme park that looked like it was mobbed with about 10,000 of them...

So much for Lego Land.

They probably have a website.

I'll look at it some day.

Methinks I'd best be off, since I have to pedal up to the Karlshaven Restaurant and make reservations for Friday night.

Then it looks like I had better (groan) cut the grass...

Oh joy.