Page 8 February 17, 2022
Travel from front page
Oslo—Does this look like the principal maritime thoroughfare into a major European capital? Hirtshals—Germans spent billions on an invasion spun purely out of Churchill’s spiteful, devious imagination.
B U S I N E S S A N D P R O F E S S I O N A L A D S
contractor handyman
TOUCHSTONE
PAINTING • PLASTERING
HANDYMAN
Reasonably Priced – Referrals Upon Request
310-517-9677
30 Year Business and Resident in the South Bay
SIX MONTHS – $450 • ONE YEAR – $800
We will create your B&P ad for you, at no additional cost. For information or rates, call 310-322-1830.
Interested parties email: marketing@heraldpublications.com
ContraCtor
12% SENIOR
DISCOUNTS
& Handyman
KING OF REPAIRS & REMODELING
• Plumbing & Water Damage
• Electrical • Carpentry & Flooring
• Specialize in Kitchen & Bath
• Door, Windows & Molding
We Are Open During COrOnA!!
Call Manny 310-729-9612
YOUR
AD
HERE
Email to reserve your space
marketing@heraldpublications.com
YOUR
AD
HERE
Email to reserve your space
marketing@heraldpublications.com
YOUR
AD
HERE
Email to reserve your space
marketing@heraldpublications.com
later, the Norwegians land in the crosshairs
of the Hitler-Churchill chess match and lapse
into the kind of undeclared civil war that
plagues most of the Nazi conquests. The
Market-savvy Swedes assert their neutrality
and sell iron ore to the highest bidder. The
exposed Danes try to sit out this one, but
the Germans invade anyway, and it’s over
in a few hours. But then, with the superb
leadership of King Christian X, the Danes
become the only Europeans to truly sit out
the Holocaust—refusing to co-operate with
the Nazis and spiriting all but a few hundred
of their Jewish neighbors into neutral Sweden.
So what does all this have to do with travel?
After millennia of vicious raids, brutal battles,
bloody squabbles, and all the murderous hardware
they’ll ever need, you might expect to
find a particular type of personality in these
three countries. Nowadays, it might not be
fashionable to generalize about race and culture,
but countries and regions do sport unique and
specific personalities born out of their shared
experiences. Discovering such traits, quirks,
and foibles—getting to the very essence of a
society—is what makes travel so fascinating.
But if you venture to Scandinavia in search of
warlike or warmongering, good luck.
In the 21st century, the Scandinavians
live at the top on every happiness, safety,
and satisfaction index on the planet. Walt
Disney recognized this in 1951, when he
brought the grinning Art Linkletter to the
Tivoli Gardens of Copenhagen in search of
pointers for his own Happiest Place on Earth.
There are a hundred explanations for all the
good humor—honest government, minimal
interference, income equality, low crime, great
welfare benefits, universal health care and
education, mutual social trust—but none of
them has anything to do with kicking down
the neighbors’ doors and running off with
their women.
It’s not as if the Scandinavians spend
their days grinning and giggling with joi de
vivre. We found people to be correct more
than friendly—informative and well-spoken,
generous with their time and advice, modest
in their dress, and mild in their manners—but
not particularly interested in catering to the
scatterbrained whims of foreigners. They
might trawl around town in their modest
fleets of bicycles, but these people know
all about their impact on history and might
even relish it. In many ways, change the
shop and road signs, prune back the Volvos
and Saabs, and we could have been touring
those thoroughly Scandinavian colonies of
(northern) Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Our last trip to these parts started off in
Belgium as a drive to anywhere and, by
pure chance, took us to the Skagerrak Straits
and the Kattegat Sea, the enormous body of
water between the Baltic and North Seas that
both unites and divides the western Nordic
kingdoms. We try to incorporate at least one
ferry into every adventure, and this time went
overboard (so to speak), crossing the Elbe and
the Fehmarn Belt to Denmark, the overnight
cruise up the Kattegat from Copenhagen to
Oslo, several fjord-jumpers down the jagged
Swedish coast, and the afternoon boat from
Göteborg back to the Jutland peninsula.
But it was halfway up the Kattegat, with
flat, featureless Jutland on our left, that we
realized just how perfect the weather had
been, how hushed the vast blue waters, how
clear and clean the intense indigo atmosphere.
After years of commuting across the North
Sea, we had direct personal experience of
the noisy, vicious storms and cyclones that
could churn these angry seas and appall the
stomachs of the most hardy voyagers. We’d
seen bitterly cold days when the sun rose and
set within an hour of lunch. Admittedly, those
experiences hadn’t turned us into marauding
Vikings, but they hadn’t exactly left us
happy either. Nevertheless, on this trip and
in the perfection of that ageless maritime
paradise, we could pretend that we were, in
fact, two of the most satisfied souls on the
planet. And that alone was worth the price
of admission.
Next up: Cherchez la Truffe!
Ben & Glinda Shipley, published writers
and photographers, share their expertise and
experience of their many world travels. If
you have any questions or interest in a particular
subject, please email them at web@
heraldpublications.com. •
Jutland—Girls amble where colossal battleships shattered the serenity of the northern night sky. Hvide Sande—Herring huts await their owners on a overcast North Sea morning.