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Summer House Traaen

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It’s now several days since we arrived at the family summer house near Hulsig and it’s been lovely. We’ve been swimming, built dams, seen lots of wildlife and had lots to eat and drink, and it’s almost time to say goodbye. Here’s a bit about some of the experiences we’ve had here.

When we arrived Friday night we had a feast of crab claws with some lovely white wine. Personally, I would prefer crab claws over lobster any day. The meat is so tasty and firm and juicy and building a pile on top of the bread is very satisfying. The only problem is that you run out of appetite and we didn’t seem to have eaten half of them. On Sunday night we had even more 🙂

Saturday was the big Hesselholt party, where everyone brings a dish and we all dig in. To the right is a photo of all the food when it was lined up (except the cake). There was frikadeller, two tarts (salmon and chicken), smoked salmon and tuna mousse which is a mixture of tuna, egg, peas, something creamy and more. Of course this just wouldn’t go down properly without some lubrication, so there was an almost equally appetising table in the corner of the room: the drinks table. I took a photo of it, but I’m not going to post it here, as it was mostly a lot of cans and bottles of beer and wine. Nothing quite as exciting to look at as the food table, even if it was at least as enjoyable.

Feast


After we’d feasted and rested for a bit, we all went to the beach to have a swim in the sea. This is a tradition and normally we’re lucky with the water temperature rising to the occasion. This time we were just lucky with the weather. In spite of the forecast predicting grey cool weather, we had lots of sun and it was very pleasant on the beach. The best way to describe the water was to say it was very refreshing, and it made the air and sun seem that much warmer. Afterwards we went back to the summer house for cake and coffee (or beer or wine). There were two large blueberry cakes with loads of blueberries picked in the heaths around the summer house accompanied with creme fraiche and more fresh blueberries. I had some more beer from my brewery Skagen Bryghus which I own (2) shares in.

After having eaten a lot of cake, we all felt like getting some exercise. This led us to undertake what has been a tradition up here since I was a child: dam building. It wasn’t quite as simple as that, and hasn’t been in the later years, where simply damming the stream isn’t challenging enough. Instead we decided that we would change the flow of the stream by cutting off its two long bends and driving it straight into the sea. This wasn’t a small task and it took a lot of hard work from quite a few eager “engineers”. In the first of the photos on the right you can see everybody hard at work, though some of the smaller kids didn’t quite share the vision of the project, and set up a protest dam in the middle of the new canal. However, after some clever diplomacy from the parents, they were persuaded to let progress progress. The second photo shows the final result just before we went home to avoid the many mosquitos that were showing up shortly after the sun ducked behind the dunes.


We had succeeded in changing the path of the stream and it was now flowing straight into the sea, apart from the lake on the right. When we returned the day after we were surprised to find that the stream was still flowing along our new path, though it had flooded the right hand dam and created an even bigger lake in the bend of its old bed.

This is all for now, for even though I haven’t described all our adventures at the summer house and in Skagen, we’re going to Skanderborg Festival tomorrow, so I might have to catch up on the blogging after we get home.