Jelling – My Geek Odyssey

Saturday: Walked 4.4 miles

Today started with a nice breakfast before heading back to the LEGO House for one more circuit and to get the virtual geocache on the roof. We discovered a few of our Fan Tour colleagues were also staying at the Refborg Hotel – this was an awesome place walking distance, I mean about a block, away from LEGO House. We started by grabbing a locker (free to guests- activated using your wristband) and then went back to the shop. I believe I mentioned this before, but LEGO Store with Minifig factories have exclusive designs making it a go to place for people who want exclusive minifigs. I bought the last exclusive set available from LEGO house and five minifigs, then sat at the computer before the crowd got too big designing special torsos for each. I did give Sue the chance to work on a couple. As those were printing we looked for heads, legs, hair and accessories. After putting our purchases in our locker we headed back to get our six-brick combination and code. There are over 900 million ways you can put six bricks together. Using your wristband you are randomly given one of those combinations. You then can pick up six 2×4 bricks from the “smallest LEGO brick factory” in the world. Go home and build your combination.

Sue and I saw they had a building activity just outside and decided to see if we could join in… timed entrance given out in the shop. We decided we had other things to do so back into the house!

The “Mood Mixer” had you build a character and choose it’s mood (Educators this is “SEL” Conservatives this is not “CRT”). Since we were happy We both choose to do a “Happy Dance”.

My Batman build from the night before was considered “worthy” enough to be used as a demo!

After these activities and as the crowd of people grew, we recalled our goal for the day- to log the virtual geocache on the roof of the LEGO house. You see, LEGO house designers decided that the “physical” aspect of play would be on the roof, so there are playgrounds accessible from the various colored areas. Also, when the house is open there are play areas accessible without a ticket from the outside of the house. These areas lead you to the roof. The roof is a scale 2×4 brick over the Master Gallery. The dinosaurs are under the brick’s tubes and the studs (knobs) on the top are actually skylights. The challenge- take your picture standing on the glass. Being a bit acrophobic this is a challenge, but I did it with Cecil. Oh, the things I do for that monkey.

We then picked up our stuff dropped it off at the hotel and returned to Jelling to see the Viking museum. For a small free museum, it was amazing. They took you through the history of Jelling, the birthplace of Denmark. We had visited the sites outside earlier the week, the museum tied it all together and the accompanying adventure lab helped too. They also had a great exhibit highlighting “Bluetooth” and King Harald. For me, they even had a comic book! I was glad we had the opportunity to come back when the museum was open.

Cecil felt like he was back in Rome, Georgia!

The museum’s exhibits were interactive, if you touched the orange part it would display the viking’s wound and if it were fatal.

I know why it’s called Bluetooth… do you?

We returned to Billund, stopped off again at the LEGOland hotel to see what exclusive sets they had and The LEGO Group HQ for a photo op then decided to chase down petrol for our rental car… we’ve been off whimventuring (yes, I just invented a word- aren’t you proud of me?) for a week and had used up almost a full tank of gas. Don’t know what was going on but none of my credit cards were considered “valid” by the unmanned kiosk at the gas station. I even called one of the companies and got a “Not our problem” response, frustrated we returned to the hotel to deal with one more frustration before dinner- how are we going to get all this stuff home?!?

LEGO has an activity in which they people the exact same bricks and ask them to “build a duck” the cool thing is that every time I’ve done this- everyone’s duck is different.

This duck exercise emphasizes everyone’s uniqueness and how there is more than one solution.

I’m sure there are some groups in the US that would frown upon this…

This had been in the back of my mind since before we left and I thought I had it all figured out… yes, I make myself laugh too. I had packed my normal suitcase inside a larger suitcase which is brilliant until you realize the larger suitcase, isn’t that much larger. We thought about options and even went out to buy a duffel bag to put clothes into. Why is Denmark the second happiest place on earth (according to Pub trivia)? Because culturally they close thing down early. Weekends are not a time to go shopping until dawn. Stores close early so most people get time off to do stuff with family & friends. Remember when we arrived on Sunday the reception had closed right after lunch. We arrived jet lagged, exhausted to an envelop with a key left on a low shelf. People matter, you don’t need to be at work 24/7 because you aren’t expected to be open, or available 24/7. If only America would… funny thing is I see one group cheering about “honoring the sabbath” then the same people complaining because they couldn’t go to the store to pick up last minute snacks for the big game. 🙄

So before dinner we looked at all the sets we had bought and what the airline requirements were and got to work figuring out what fit into three suitcases, two daypacks and two tote bags given to us from the fan tour. The suitcases, once packed would be checked and we wouldn’t work about them, everything we’d have to lug around… not including anything else we might pick up “duty-free.” Before we headed out for dinner our nerves were calmer, we’d figured it out, with only a couple of question marks that weren’t impossible.

Monday: walked 6.41 miles

I learned in my research a couple of things- first, museums are closed on Mondays and Sue told me LEGOland doesn’t open until the end of the month. 😢 This turned Monday into a “play it by ear” day… which means catering to our whims. After waking up and then crashing again… I’m glad that elephant was on guard. I looked around our room and realized that we had just let our suitcases explode and after a knock on the door from the cleaning crew, decided we may need to get our act together. because we were off to Odense where I had booked the next hotel… but what circuitous route should we take?

Using Geocaching & Adventure Labs (AL) as ways to explore unknown areas.

I’m not too fond of geocaching to just get numbers or color in a map or grid (That’s Sue). That’s why I don’t cache that much around home. I have returned to attending local events, but mostly that’s what I do unless we are traveling. When traveling geocaching opens the area to me unlike so many other things. It’s like having a local show you around. Once we checked out of the hotel we decided to take a bit of a walk around Billund before leaving. I think I did well choosing a hotel walking distance from LEGO House. This will make getting to Friday’s Tour easier. We wandered the area around LEGO House to make sure we had an idea of our environment (no guard elephants to keep us safe now). We popped into LEGO House and decided to leave before I got to the point of just staying, or buying stuff. So instead we picked up a few AL stages and an actual cache before heading to Jelling to do a bit of the same. Why Jelling? Jelling is home to a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a Viking Museum (see note about Museums & Mondays). After wandering around Jelling doing one of the ALs and picking up at least one geocache we realized that we were cold, and that we had been smart bringing cold weather gear, just not smart enough to put it on. We then headed to our stop for evening, Odense.

Interestingly today was planned specifically as a day of acclimation. For us to get used to being outside and walking in late winter, early spring temperatures, but also to get a feeling of how long it takes to get from place to place. In the U.S. if I’m planning a long drive I tend to divide the distance by 60 to get a conservative idea of how long it will take. We found in England, that wasn’t the case. It took longer, maybe it was because we were not on major roads for a lot of it, but the anxiety in me decided that having a day to figure things out might be good. What did we discover? That we are going places “off the beaten path” so plan for more time than you think. Sue got the car, so Sue was the driver… it was out of my control.

After Jelling we arrived in Odense, parked the car and headed to the hotel. The hotel had given us parking recommendations, so the lot was just around the corner. Check in wasn’t until 16:00 but we thought we’d check to see if we get in at around 14:00. We could, and we plopped in the room for a few minutes before heading out. We were told “turn right” to get to pretty much everything so we did, so as to get the lay of the land. We then started hunting around to see about caches and Adventure Labs leading us to the cathedral of St. Canute. The hard part was the entire adventure lab was in Danish! It required me to flex my tech muscles and use Google Translate and then special characters when typing in answers. We still haven’t figured out one part… so we can’t complete it. Not to worry, there are other AL that we haven’t finished and probably won’t. You see early on the default was to create a sequential route. You couldn’t move on to the next stage until you answered the question. Most AL didn’t have a reason to have an order, so it just gets in the way and makes you retrace your steps a larger scale version of the old “drunken bee dance.” One thing that was awesome about Odense was the lack of cars in the city center. It’s all either bikes or pedestrians. The bikes are fast, so you need to keep alert, but it was nice to not have to worry so much. Wish it had not been Monday, I would have liked to visit the Hans Christian Andersen Museum… maybe another time.

While we did eat in Amsterdam, Spicy Korean Fries at BrewDog, our first real meal was at a nice cafe towards the end of the afternoon. The experience was a bit different compared to the U.S.- order and pay first at the bar. Sue had a stir fry thing and I had a “spicy sandwich.” Both were excellent but not Danish cuisine. Sometimes you just want “food.”

Afterwards, we camped out for a bit in the room, but decided the one thing we didn’t want to do was go to sleep too early. I looked out the window and tried to figure out what was going on in a building across the street. Tables and bright colored stuff on the wall. First thought, it was some kind of a Sue store- it sold fabrics, yarn and sundries. I kept looking and saw what looked like a dragon head on the wall. Later Sue got tired of me puzzling over it and decided we needed to pick up provisions for tomorrow which would require a walk by the building. It was a geek store- by which I mean games, comics, books, cosplay/LARP (Faraos Cigarer a chain of stores throughout Denmark- the name comes from TinTin). I decided to quietly walk in and check it out… oh my! I really need to brush up on my TinTin and other European comics! After a while decided to head out… checking their hours for tomorrow, I saw on the door they were actually closed! The door was open for the gaming group, not customers! 😳🙄 At the local grocery store we picked up snacks for the road and some drinks- the Danish version of Vitamin Water. Then it was off to bed to be ready for the drama and tragedy the next day would bring.