Marcelus ("Hamlet") said it first!

Not our favourite place heading out, and no better on the return - I'm sure there is much good to be said about Denmark, but we seem to have no luck here. We had hoped for another Kiel type of location as Denmark is renowned for its beautiful white sand shoreline, and were meant to end up at something that sounded absolutely wonderful - a farm location by the shore. Due, however, to human error (in this case mine) with several webpages open as we were doing our bookings, I passed the finalizing over to Mico and in grand fiasco we ended up booking ourselves into the wrong place.

Consequently, we were surprised to find ourselves on arrival, rather than at a farm, in the parking lot of a local city mall to which the hotel was attached. Figuring out what went wrong did not take so much time, but trying to correct it in the late hours of the afternoon became difficult. The hotel graciously cancelled our booking - but how to find on short notice the sort of place we had been hoping for? The Danish websites were again more time-consuming than most to work through. Just to have an idea of an area to aim for would have been the most helpful, but even the hotel receptionist, who was (overbearingly) helpful, could not provide just that simple information. We ended up driving along the coastline towards Copenhagen, certain we would find a place there along the way. What we found, however, was not even a glimpse of the ocean, but only industry of the most horrible kind, that, moreover, smelled as bad as it looked. Of the couple of hotels that we might have taken just out of desperation, we found that they were completely booked.

After our experience at the outset of our journey, Copenhagen was the last place in Europe we wanted to end up, but that was just exactly what happened - like a returning bad dream, we had to relive the same scenario of outrageous places, prices, and full bookings. In retreat, we headed back again towards where we had come from to a small and sad little town, whose hotels were for some unbeknownst reason fully booked too! Our only option ended up being a rather overpriced "Quality" hotel - of course, a name like that implies immediately it is an oxymoron. Dirty and depressing, it shared a place on the bottom three of our list along with our first accommodation in Denmark. The receptionist on seeing our tired and worn-out looking faces mercifully upgraded us to a better suite, "away", she said, "from the railway noise", and, "more spacious". I can't imagine what we would have had if we hadn't been upgraded. As we decided to make the best of things and go down for a snack, before changing my shoes, I stepped into a blob of something sticky and brown that I was of no mind to closer inspect. The mini crab cakes I ordered should more aptly have been called microscopic, but the waiter was very amiable, making his best efforts to please, as if apologetic for the embarrassment of working there. The place gave the impression on the outside of having formerly served as a hospital or penitentiary. Mico's mattress, he said, was the worst so far, making a long drive the next day especially uncomfortable.

We left, in full haste the next morning, towards a town we had liked very much on first starting out, Norrköping, Sweden.