Today was dedicated to getting to and seeing Egeskov Slot. The best I can do in phoenetics is ehyezkoe as a sound. It has no G sound and no V sound at all in the pronunciation. Where Copenhagen is on an island, Egeskov is on another island closer to the mainland, named Fyn (Foon). The drive itself wasn't difficult but was in the range of 2 hours and we had to cross the very long and very tall bridge between the two islands. Crossing the bridge costs a toll but there weren't a lot of cars going through at the time we were there. They do have their on version of the fast lane but the rental car didn't have the transponder so we had to do it the old fashioned way.
By the time we got there it was basically lunch so we bought our tickets for the castle and grounds and then went to the cafeteria restaurant and had lunch. I had a local Odense Classic along with a chicken sandwich that had bacon, lettuce, tomato, yellow peppers, cucumber and a bit of mayonaise on it. It was obviously a cold sandwhich but it was pretty good.
Egeskov is a fairly old castle but like most Danish castles it is built from brick because they didn't have stone. The castle is not very large and is privately owned. The owners use it as a residence so a lot of the actual building is closed off. The grounds are fairly big involving sculptured gardens as well as flower gardens. They have a motor museum which has cars, planes, helicopters and a very large collection of motorcycles. They have a maze formed from plants which we think were bamboo but are not certain. We did not go through the maze. There was also a treetop bridge walk that I tested my fear of heights against. I did not fair perfectly through this as almost the moment we got to the top of the platform a kid ran up the stairs and while we were taking a couple pictures of the grounds ran out on the to the bridge and started jumping up and down as hard as she could. The entire platform was shaking. Her mom yelled at her and they moved ahead of us. I then managed to get through the experience successfully. I was not fully happy about it, but I did challenge myself and succeed. Once up there was no turning back. While up there I didn't really take any pictures, though in hindsight I should have for the sake of it though nothing looked terribly great.
This is the point when we visited the actual castle. We got to go through 4 floors including the attic. Rooms were set up museum style rather than residence and there was a significant collection of hunting trophies as well a lot of toys and a very neat large dollhouse. The exhibits were interesting and there were a lot of red buttons for me to press activate passages of text or poetry being read in Danish. I didn't understand them, but I was compelled to press the buttons anyway.
When we were entering the castle I noticed the gift shop in the outbuilding and wondered if we should go in before the castle. I figured that having to carry extra stuff through the castle might be a pain so didn't mention to George the idea and decided to just go in. This is where I need to point out that today is a reasonably ok weather August Tuesday with no holiday to mention or anything else, yet a lot of the gift shops were closed and even the cafeteria seemed limited. The grounds hours are 10am to 5pm and yet when we exited the castle proper at a little past 3pm the gift shop which was opened not that long ago was no longer open. I am not sure why anything like the ice cream shops and such were closed at all, the place was fairly busy after all. I was even more confounded by the idea the gift shop closed so early. Accorging to George, that's Denmark. Anyway it was annoying but we had to trek back to the motor museum to a smaller gift shop there to get the magnet I wanted and a book on the castle. After doing this we headed out and drove back to George's apartment where we called his friend Jesper and waited for him to come over.
We went to dinner at an Italian restaurant up the street from his apartmet. I had ordered the meat lasagna but since they were out of lasagna ended up with spaghetti with meatballs instead. It wasn't bad at least. We stayed there through 2 drinks and then vacated due to the smoke from the outside seats coming into the building. From there we headed back and chatted a bit more before calling it a night.
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