Wanderung 30

(Bob) After being serenaded by a cuckoo during breakfast, we left our charming little cabin in the woods and carefully drove out the accss road as it had some really sharp, large gravel pebbles that could have blown out a bicycle tire!

We detoured almost immediately off our route a bit to see a small church in Aarstrup that reputedly had some nice chalk frescoes. Wow did it ever! The frescoes were painted in chalk, apparently, and just covered the ceiling with Biblical scenes, making the church, perhaps suprisingly, a bright and cheerful place. One odd ornament in the church was a model of a full-rigged sailing ship hanging from the ceiling. At the time I thought it was unusual, but as we continued our tour through the Danish islands, several more churches also had beautifully-crafted models of various ships hanging from the ceiling. Curious.

The gaveyard surrounding the church was also impressive as it was like a Zen meditation garden of beautifully clean, uniform pebbles in gravesites surrounded by low walls of green boxwood hedges trimmed precisely to form the borders. As in Germany, individual gravesites had different gavestones and family mementoes, all carefully arranged. Very pretty.

We continued nothwards to Stubbekobing, where we took a small, historic ferry across the narrow strait to the island of Bogo, where the concept of a 2-for-1 sale originated. Once on Bogo we turned East and followed the main highway across a causeway to the island of Mon. I was impressed that the drivers on the highway all moved over to give us maximal space, which was important as we had no shoulder and had to ride in the right side of the lane. Nerve-wracking.

But we turned off that road as soon as we could in Mon and started following Denmark's bike trail number 8 along the East coast of Mon. Although somewhat longer, the bike route had much less traffic, and we were rewarded by seeing another church with those amazing chalk frescoes in Fanefjord.

If anything, the frescoes in the Fanefjord church were better kept and clearer than the ones at Aarstrup. Also, they had a guide in English that explained which Biblical story each part of the ceiling depicted, and that was an enormous help! I think they had every major Biblical incident on that ceiling, and if you think about trying to teach Chistianity to illiterate parishioners, those scenes were also quite practical for instruction.

From the church we wound our way over to the Baltic Sea and then curled northward to Stege, passing some Bronze Age burial mounds in a forest on the way. Apparently the earlier, bigger mounds are the graves of complete bodies, whereas the smaller, later mounds were made after the people shifted to cremation. Who knew cremation already started in the Bronze Age?

In Stege we stopped to see some antique cars and motorcyles parked in front of a mobile bandstand where a local group was playing. Monika found nail clippers and I picked up 2 more bungee cords to help hold packs on top of our luggage racks. The store was like a Tuesday Morning store in the USA , so they also had high quality items at reasonable prices, and we couldn't resist buying a silver pair of kissing ice skaters to hang on our Christmas tree.

We were really beat by then, but fortunately our vacation cabin was just a couple kilometers out of town and we found it just off the main road. Monika hand-washed some clothes and I removed the bicycle packs to prepare for the big loop trip out to the cliffs at the eastern end of the Island of Mon that we had planned for the next day.