12 July: Transfer to Bergen

We said goodby to the very pleasant Villa Provence at 7:30 this morning and hauled our rolly bags a half kilometer to Aarhus central station. There we caught the 8:17 train to Copenhagen's Kastrup airport, the same airport where we arrived 9 days ago. The plan was to take a 2:05 flight to Bergen, Norway.

(Marian asked, "Aarhus has an airport, why didn't we fly from there?" Shut up, is why. Because David never thought of it. Turns out, though, that every flight from Aarhus to Bergen changes planes or lays over in CPH anyway.)

Anyway, we had this nice 3.5 hour train ride through more beautiful Danish countryside.

This route touches three land masses. We originate in Jutland, a peninsula of Europe. We cross a bridge onto Funen, a large island with Odense at its center. Then from Funen to Zealand, the train has to cross a 15-mile stretch of the same ocean we crossed on the ferry a few days ago. Up until 1998 this would have meant using a ferry, but then Denmark built the Nyborg Bridge or Great Belt Bridge, which includes the third-longest suspension span in the world. We were ready with the camera when it came into view.

The train rolled along beside the autos on the causeway section but then to our disappointment it ducked into a tunnel. So we crossed that strait underwater instead of over it.

Copenhagen airport was as we remembered it, a zoo.

SAS departures was all self-service. You find a machine in the milling mob and print your boarding pass and baggage sticker strip.

Milling mob around check-in machines.

You put the strip on your bag and go through a maze to an automated baggage desk. Put your bag on the conveyer and use a hand-scanner to scan its tag. The bag rolls away. It's actually a pretty efficient system, if one has done it before. Learning it the first time in this mob was a bit stressful.

But after it was done we could look down and smugly observe the other travelers

Marian and two new friends watch the action.

Then came the half-mile (no exaggeration) walk to our gate. The only casualty of the day was David's hat, which went AWOL somewhere, so now he has an excuse to shop for a hat in Norway.

Flying in to Bergen there was quite a bit of haze but we could see it was a very different sort of terrain than flat, soft Denmark.

Click through on this and ask: What the heck is that thing built into the cliff lower left?

After settling into our hotel room and having a restorative nap, we went out to find some supper. We are established on the Bryggen, a row of old buildings that is a world heritage site, and being restored using original materials and methods. It's very popular on a warm evening.

Later we hit the tourist info office and booked some events for the next few days. The weather is finally breaking; partial overcast, possible showers, cooling are forecast. Just in time to block the views of fjords? Well, maybe not, and anyway, we've already had better weather than we could have expected.