Those Places Thursday: Mom's 1953 Europe Road Trip - Denmark

From Mom's Europe trip diary, in the "PLACES VISITED" section:

September 4, Friday – Road between Vejle and Hirtshals, Denmark

Drove up to Skanderborg where we took a side road to Øm.  An old Cistercian monastery is there which was recently explored.  We saw many old bones and skeletons of people who had all sorts of diseases.  We don't know what they died of since we couldn't read Danish.  We went on to Aarhus where we ate lunch.  I couldn't read menus so drew a fish for waitress.  She had a big laugh for their word for fish is fish.  From Aarhus we went on to Aalborg--a few miles from there we stopped to see an old chalk quarry, "Thingbæk Kalkminer" where we got the caretaker to let us in to see the chalk models of a sculptor named [Anders] Bundgaard.  It was real cold in this place and he had sculpted beautiful faces and heads and figures in chalk.  Very impressive.

We drove on to Hirtshals where we found rooms in a hotel* where there are 2 fellow Americans (the Andy Olsons of Forest Hills, Long Island).  They were very helpful which was lucky since the people at the hotel do not speak English and they promised to give us a route through Norway which would show us fjords, etc.

* According to the "HOTELS STOPPED AT" section of the trip diary, my mother and her friends spent this night at the Missionshotel Skagarak, Hirtshals, Denmark.

Here is a picture of the interior of the Thingbæk Kalkminer (Thingbæk limestone mine) - you can see some of Bundgaard's original plaster models for his sculptures:

Minegang i Thingbæk Kalkminer [My times in Thingbæk Chalk Mine, 24 October 2012] /Lars Rigborg  / CC-BY-SA-3.0

This is the 28th in a series of posts transcribing entries in my mother's 1953 Europe Trip journal.


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