From wooden ships to tomatoes (Everyday Adventures in North Jutland, week 7)

Læsetid: ca. 7 min.

Here, behind the old school in Testrup, is a nice shelter site with toilet and shower.

It was Sunday night when we arrived at Vesthimmerland Municipality, so the first thing we were looking for was a place to stay.

We checked on our shelter app if there were anywhere in the nearby area with a shelter, cause they are mostly located in areas with beautiful nature and many times there are also toilet facilities attached.

We found a shelter with toilet in Testrup, where it also looked like we could park the Turtle and drove there.

And there it was, behind the old school in Testrup, were two shelters and a large parking lot. And not only were there a toilet in the site, there was simply a shower with hot water! That’s a rare sight – but really great when traveling around as we do.

So the shelter site in Testrup was immediately plotted on our ‘Turtle card’ over good stopovers.

Around the Limfjord
We stayed there for the night and drove further north the next day, since we were told that there was the ‘Around the Limfjord’ (wooden ship sailing) with departure from Løgstør this Monday.
On our way to Løgstør we, as usual, drove along the small roads, as that’s where there’s really potential to see and experience something.

And we were quite right. On our trip to Løgstør we first drove through Trend, overlooking the Limfjord, past Vitskøl Monastery and Vindblæs Mill – which we stopped and visited, as we have a weakness for old mills – and last, but not least, Vilsted Lake .

We have a weakness for old mills and therefore also stopped at Vindblæs Mill.

When we came to Løgstør, the old wooden ships were entering the harbor and the atmosphere at the harbor already began to emerge from festivities.
By a coincidence we ran into the only man Morten knows in Løgstør, namely 83 years old Niels, whom he met in Aggersund this summer when Niels was out training his hunting dog.

We talked to him and looked at steam engines together, which one of Niels’ acquaintances has built and now stood at the maritime party and showed to people passing by.
Afterwards we went with Niels to Lions’ little foodcorner, where we invited him to a mussel hotdog and continued talking there.

It’s funny how we talk to people who are much older than ourselves, time after time, you actually don’t notice the difference in age when the talk is in progress.

Niels met some others he knew, so we said goodbye to him and went further around the city to experience the maritime atmosphere. We heard a sailor’s orchestra rehearsing for the evening’s concert, went into the Limfjord Museum and saw an exhibition about eel and was on a harbor walk with Peter Leth from Hobro Shipyard, which we had met the week before in Hobro.

On the harbor walk with Peter Leth we got stories about some of the participating ships.

My parents came to Løgstør to meet us, as they only live 10 kilometers away.
We walked around talking while looking at the various things that were going on around the harbor area, including the vintage car show and another trip to the steam engines, which my father was very interested in.

At night we went into the party tent and heard “The Galvanized Leopards” while we were eating hotdogs and drinking a beer. We could all sing along to many of the sailors’ songs they played, but it was only a good deal into their concert, when Morten and I realized why they had chosen to call themselves such an atypical name as’ The Galvanized Leopards’ . It wasn’t until my parents began talking about the concerts they had been to with “The Golden Lions” when they were young, we understood where the name “The Galvanized Leopards” came from – apparantly an obvious name for this copy band.

The next morning we saw the old wooden ships sail out of the harbor in a light rain while we were still under the duvet.
We had parked on the first parquet down to the water, so we found the binoculars and lay under the duvet looking out of the window while the ships were sailing.
What a luxury to lie in the bed under the duvetand still have the opportunity to be a spectator of the wooden ship sailing.

We could lie under the duvet and watch the wooden ships sail off.

Small guests in Turtle
In the afternoon we drove to Aars. Although we had been home in Denmark for 3 months, we hadn’t yet had my nephews on a Turtle tour – even though they really like it.
So now that we were in Vesthimmerland municipality, I had agreed with my sister that we could come and pick up the boys after school on Tuesday, take them on tour and then hand them over to school on Wednesday morning.

So we drove to Aars School and picked up Jonas and Lasse. Jonas was allowed to sit in front with Morten and decide where to go. He could just say right or left as we arrived to a crossroad.
At first he was a little nervous, but when we assured him that he couldn’t do something wrong, because we had no destination, it seemed like he relaxed a bit more and grew with the task.

We ended up in Hvalpsund, half an hour drive from Aars, which was very suitable for having to drive the boys back to school the next morning.
We parked in a parking lot near the harbor and just enjoyed ourselves in and around Turtle all afternoon and evening.
We went for a walk down the harbor in windy weather, played ball, greeted some cows on the field, made Swedish sausage stew and ate it for dinner, lubricated lunch boxes and drank hot cocoa with whipped cream and marshmallows. Top cozy!

Having fun with the nephews at the harbor in Hvalpsund.

The boys climbed into the sleeping bags upstairs, while Morten and I slept downstairs.
The next morning, we experienced how a common morning can be in a family of children: mother, aka Aunt Mette, hurrying up the kids to get out of the door on time. And we succeeded in just handing over the boys on time, namely 3 minutes to 8.

When we’d sent the boys to school, we drove out into Aars Forest and stayed there most of the day – we just needed to have some peace of mind after a lively afternoon, evening and morning with the boys.
In the afternoon we drove home to my sister, to also see her and help a little with something practical, since she’s in the middle of the renovation of her house and at the same time we had the opportunity to be with the nephews one more evening while we was in the area.

200 sorts of tomatoes
The next day we drove home to Mona, who lives on the farm Kampkjær between Aars and Farsø.
Mona had seen our posting on facebook that we were in the area and wanted to meet some locals and therefore she’d invited us home to her so she could show us her hobby.

The hobby was, in all its simplicity, tomatoes. It had started out with the fact that, like so many others, she wanted to grow tomatoes in her greenhouse. But then it became, as she said herself, “a hobby that had gone a little out of hand.”
Cause now, Mona has two large greenhouses of approx. 50 m2 each, where she grows approx. a total of 200 different tomato varieties.
There were yellow, red, green and blue tomatoes and there were huge tomatoes, small ribs, round, elongated and diced tomatoes.
She told lively about her passion for tomatoes and we were allowed to taste several of them. Before we drove, she also gave us a big tray of different tomatoes, thanking for the visit.

Mona had tomatoes in all different types of varieties.

Another funny thing to see at Monas place was their shelter. It was big enough for 4 people, you could stand upright in there and there were 2 regular double beds in there at normal height and with mattresses.
Mona and her husband and children love to sleep out there and with a wool blanket they sleep there year round.

Presentation for the family club
After our visit at Monas we drove home to my uncle and aunt in Østerbølle. Here we were invited to present our life in the van in their family club. We arrived in the afternoon, so we managed to talk to my aunt and uncle and take a walk with them both before the family club visited for dinner.
I also got to talk and enjoy myself with my cousins and it was great to have the opportunity to be with them without there being a lot of others which is always the case when I see them with the rest of the family.

We had a nice evening with the family club and then drove north towards Aalborg, where we had plans the following day – our everyday adventures in Vesthimmerlands municipality ended for this time.

Tips for upcoming everyday adventures in the municipality of Vesthimmerland:
We were given the following tips that we didn’t have time to visit, but probably will come back and visit them another time – or which some of you might want to explore?

  • The Borremose Fortress.
  • At Tetzlaff in Løgstør.
  • Søttrup Plantation.
  • De Himmerlandske Heder.
  • Aggersborg.
  • Glenholm Vineyard.
  • Næsbydale Bathhotel.
  • Livø, nature’s quiet coupe.
  • The world’s largest hand-rotated ceramic pot from the ceramist Askel Krog.
  • Rosenparken in Aalestrup.
  • Denmark’s Bicycle Museum which has lent out a lot to ‘Matador’.
  • Eat ‘shooting stars’ in Rønbjerg Fishhouse.
  • Bølle Bob town Hornum.
  • Vesthimmerlands Gocart Association – the only gocart club for children in Denmark.
  • The new ‘Matador’ gablepainting by servant Boldt + the Per Kirkeby wall in Aars.
  • The worlds best ‘shooting stars’ at Trend Inn.
  • The church hill in Næsborg.
  • The Danish Contemporary Museum at Støberivej in Aars.
  • Ll. Restrup Hovedgaard.
  • Gallery Himmerland.
  • Gallery Thrane.
  • Pakhus Burger at Pakhuset in Hvalpsund.
  • The greenhouse in Vesterbølle – with Buddhist “temple”.
  • Fried pork ad libitum at Simested Kro + fishing trips at Simested Å.
  • Bicycle ride on Himmerlandsstien.

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