A day trip to Skagen..and a surprise!

Norman and I travel constantly, but really, we are terrible tourists.

Since our lives are itinerant and we're on the road for at least 9 months a year or more, we need to establish routines in order to get anything done and stay sane, especially when our surroundings are constantly changing.

This means that when we are working, our days mostly consist of going from work to home, even when we're in amazing places like Venice or New York. While that might be surprising, we find

it helps keep us grounded and healthy in a career rife with instability, and it works for us.

However, it does seem criminal to visit so many incredible places and not see anything but the inside of concert halls and hotels, so we've been trying to improve. In October we finally visited the Eiffel Tower, after over 50 trips to Paris between the two of us, and it was great!

Hence this week, Norman and I visited the resort town Skagen, about an hour and fifteen minutes from our base in Aalborg - lovingly referred to as the "Hamptons of Denmark" - where the North Sea and the Baltic Sea meet.

In the summertime the beach, which is situated at the northernmost point of the country, and the surrounding area can have as many as a million tourists, but when we visited, we had the whole place to ourselves, save our friends Susanna and Tecwyn, and a cute bulldog and his owners!

The beautiful white sand beaches are home to three former WWII bunkers. This one jokingly says that it has "rooms available."

And of course Norman going inside one of the bunkers...I opted out of this experience. Apparently there is a lot of sand (!) inside, garbage, and a fire pit. So now you know!

Here are Norm and Tecwyn surveying the moorland.

There's the bulldog! Yes, I'm a weirdo that takes pics of other people's pets!

It gets dark very early during the winter in Denmark and the beach was pretty cold, so we headed home after about an hour or so. It was invigorating and we won't soon forget our trip! As we were driving home, I felt proud and satisfied that we broke with routine and got out of work mode for a few hours, especially since I'm not a beach person. (Even in the summer!)

When we arrived back in Aalborg, Norman and I decided to have dinner Cafe Peace, a local restaurant with a cosy atmosphere. At the neighboring table were some fellow Americans, and they struck up a conversation with us. To our surprise, at the end of the evening they picked up our tab without telling us! I think in all the years of traveling from place to place, this is the first time a complete stranger has done that. We were incredibly grateful for the gesture, and it was the perfect end to our day. After dinner, our new friends insisted on giving us a tour of the town, since one of them grew up here, and we were touched that they would want to do so for us.

I wonder what will happen next?