Andy's EPIC Road Trip Scandinavia
Denmark and Southern Sweden 2015
Back to Helsinborg for the 90-minute drive to Ystad, from where we were taking the 2-hour ferry to Bornholm, which - though on the same longitude as southern Sweden – is part of Denmark. The family of a classmate of mine had always spent their summer holidays on this island in the Baltic Sea. For a child, this had sounded positively exotic to me, in particular in light of the fact that practically everyone in my social circles preferred the warmer Mediterranean bathtub of the Adriatic in north-eastern Italy. But here was someone whose family went north: what rebels. But they were spot on. The island is exceptionally beautiful. A Danish friend of mine had scoffed at the place and said that it looked ‘too Swedish’ for his liking (I still don’t know what he meant), and that finding suitable accommodation might be a challenge. But we had booked into a perfectly suitable Holiday Inn in the ferry port of Rønne, from where we rented bikes to ride to the southernmost tip of the island at a marvellous and expansive beach called Dueodde. Touring the rest of Bornholm was a delight with beautiful harbour villages like Gudhjem, or Swaneke, and a beautiful interior of fields, pasture, and medieval round churches, such as the one in Østerlars. I can now fully comprehend why my classmate’s family returned to this island summer after summer. The place is serene, peaceful, pretty, and very, very relaxing.