You can’t beat great Danes for family fun
FOR a country that tops the UN’s World Happiness Report, Denmark doesn’t get its due credit. Tell people you’re visiting the country and they usually reply: ‘Copenhagen?’ In contrast, mention western Denmark and you’ll get blank faces. But this family-friendly area is fabulous.
Billund is Denmark’s secondlargest airport and just minutes from the original Legoland. This is an area built on plastic bricks – the Lego factory itself is a mile from the theme park.
Legoland Billund has a kind of calm that’s hard to pull off in a theme park. Stay at the Legoland hotel and you can nip in and out – a resort pass also gets you into Lalandia, the giant water park next door. Unsurprisingly, Legoland has been the area’s big tourism driver. But with typical Danish cooperation it was an instigator of the Happy Pass in 2013, designed to help smaller local attractions.
Our drive to pretty Vejle, the regional capital, took us along empty roads bisecting countryside crowned by wind turbines.
One of the biggest collections of old Danish architecture lies north, in Aarhus’s Old Town. By contrast, the city also has ultra-modern gallery ARoS, with its fantastic rooftop Rainbow Panorama installation.
The town of Ribe matches Aarhus for historic charm – cobbled streets and squares lined with beamed buildings. We wandered through the fairytale location, fortified by Danish pastries bought by the traditional half-foot measure.
Thanks to its strategic maritime position, Ribe was also once a big Viking base. The sky was glowering at the VikingeCenter village, a reconstruction so compelling that people even spend holidays here, farming and living as medieval Scandinavians. In the drizzle, the village smelt evocatively of woodsmoke, wet thatch and animals.
Our daughter Claudia wandered through the living spaces, baking bread on a metal spoon and whittling a stick with a lathe. The highlight, though, was warrior-training, where children can learn sword skills, and fire real arrows from a bow. The adults looked on enviously.