Vacation on Ärö, day 1

I've had a bit of catching up to do after my week-long internet-free vacation in Denmark, but here comes the story.

For my daughter, vacation began a couple days earlier when I dropped her off with our Danish friends who have a son her age. I took the train to the Copenhagen airport where we met up. The trip was to start out with just the moms and kids; the husbands had to work but would join us later in the week. With perfect timing, I emerged from the airport just in time to see them pulling into the short-term parking lot. After a couple hour's drive, we arrived for the ferry with plenty of time to spare. The ferries must be booked long in advance, so missing one could be a catastrophe. As we walked around the dock, we were entertained by ladybugs. They walked all over us, and we were careful not to step on them. The fronts of the cars were red with ladybug carnage. Even the windows of the ferry were crawling with ladybugs. The ferry ride went smoothly, and we arrived in Ärö about an hour later.

Ärö is an island in the Baltic Sea just east of the Danish peninsula and north of Germany. It has a long history as a commercial shipping center. From all I'd heard about it, I imagined it was bigger. It's only about 35 km long and 9 km wide, so over the following week, we saw pretty much all of it.

After a short visit with my friend's aunt and uncle where the kids feasted on chips and candy, we picked up the keys and went to explore our rented summer house, and old farm about 5 km from town. The house was both large and quaint, tastefully decorated in a combination of 1950's farm house and shabby-chic.

We spent so much time exploring the house and garden that when we got to the grocery store, it was closed (4 PM on Saturday). We drove half way across the island to the other grocery store to find it closed too (5 PM on Saturday). Luckily aunt provided us with a couple of pizzas from her freezer, because eating out on the last night of the local Jazz Festival would not have been a fun thing to do with tired kids.