Last November, my girlfriend and I took a trip to Denmark and visited the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde. That was a great trip, and the ship museum was pretty great, but there were a couple things that we wanted to do, but which we couldn't because the ship museum doesn't operate them in the winter. For one thing, the museum has a collection of reconstructed Viking ships, including a full-size longship. These ships are usually docked in the harbor, along with some living exhibits of the construction and maintenance of these ships and the ropes and sails used to sail them. During winter, the exhibits are closed and the ships themselves are brought onto land and covered in order to prevent ice from forming and damaging the ships.

More importantly, the museum offers tourists the opportunity to go out sailing the reconstructed ships with a couple of museum guides. This service is also only offered in the summer due to weather restrictions, and we decided that we wanted to go back to Denmark so that we could sail a Viking ship!

Big Ben was the first of several Civilization
world wonders that I'd get to see.

She found affordable tickets to London, and we allocated two weeks to spend in Europe this summer. My dad also expressed an interest, and we offered to take him with us and pay for part of his airfare and lodging expenses as a combined Father's Day and birthday gift (his birthday is in May). We ended up deciding to take him to London, England, to Coppenhagen, Denmark, and to Munich, Germany.

London, Stonehenge, and Shakespeare

Our first stop was London, England on June 26th. We did some of the usual tourist things, like visit the Tower of London and walk by Parliament and Big Ben (one of several Civilization wonders that I would be visiting during this trip!) and Westminster Abbey. We also had fish, chips, and beer in a pub and started two week's worth of gluttonous eating! Despite walking 15 to 20 miles per day, I still gained 3 ¹/₂ pounds during the trip.

The British Parlaiment building was covered with scaffolding, apparently being repaired or remodeled. This would actually become a recurring theme during this trip, as many of the places that we visited would be covered with scaffolding.

We visited the Imperial War Museum, including the Churchill Warroom.
I tried on some World War I-era clothing, which was very uncomfortable and itchy.

The second day (Tuesday), we visited the Churchill Warroom and the Imperial War Museum. I had previously visited the Imperial War Museum in Manchester during my trip to the U.K., so this time we got to see the larger museum in London. I was a little bit disappointed that the museum didn't cover British Imperial history prior to World War I. There were no exhibits about colonial British sailing ships. The museum starts with World War I, and then goes through World War II, the Cold War, and the War on Terrorism. It also included an exhibit on the Holocaust, which was interesting because the exhibit started on the top floor, and then descended to the lower floor as the exhibits shifted from persecution of the Jews in Germany to the full-blown "final solution" period. It was a clever bit of symbolism to descend into the fullest horrors of the Holocaust.

On Wednesday, we did a day-trip with a tour company to Windsor Castle, the Roman bathhouse in Bath, and to Stonehenge (another Civ wonder!)...

Back in the summer, my girlfriend and her brother saw that Norwegian Air was offering direct flights from Las Vegas to Copenhagen, Denmark for relatively cheap (under $400 round-trip). So we bought some tickets, made reservations at a hostel in Copenhagen, and spent our Thanksgiving holiday traveling to Europe and getting some more stamps on our passports. This was only my second trip to Europe and the second set of stamps that I got on my passport.

The flight was pretty grueling. Ten hours in economy seating is not the most comfortable thing in the world. The time-zone difference also meant that the flight effectively wiped an entire day off of our calendar. Ah well. We bought a transit card called the "Copenhagen Card", which gave us free use of the public transit systems for the entire week. It also granted us free admission to some public facilities such as castles, museums, and parks. It was a very handy thing to have!

Gløgg is a Scandinavian holiday wine.

Apparently, the Danes really like Christmas. One of the things that struck us almost as soon as we got off the plane is that the entire city was decorated for Christmas. Whole buildings were covered in lights, street lights were lined with garlands, and there were multiple Yule Markets (outdoor gift and food stands) lining the streets and squares of the city. Since the Danes don't have Thanksgiving, they apparently don't have any reservations about putting up Christmas decorations in November. We walked through some of these street vendors and Yule Markets and tried our first Danish delicacy: gløgg. Gløgg is a Swedish and Danish drink that mixes hot mulled wine with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, raisins, and almonds. It's kind of like a sweet hot tea, and it's a very strong drink with a somewhat overwhelming fragrance. It was good in moderation, but its overwhelming sweetness meant that it wore out its welcome for us very quickly...