Ribe

Saturday, September 17 

Today began with a good-news, bad-news (but could-have-been-so-much-worse news) story.  Bad news first:  we’ve been in three countries on this trip and, unusually in our travels, have had three different cars.  This was the first of the three to require diesel fuel – and you can probably guess the rest of the story from there.  IMMEDIATELY after filling the tank with gasoline, Tom realized that he’d used regular gas, rather than diesel.  (His slapping the roof of the car and “forceful” language alerted me that something major had gone awry.)  Now for the good news: he realized it before even getting back behind the wheel, and had not started the car.  I’ll abbreviate the rest – in relatively short order, the car was on a flatbed tow truck, we were inside the monster cab of said truck, car was dropped at some dealer who would “deal” with it, we were at a local Avis office with a clerk who’d evidently been called to work just to help us out, and in less than two hours, we were back on the road toward our original destination.  Of course, the piper has yet to be paid, but we’ll leave that chapter for another day…

Our destination for the day was Ribe, one of Scandinavia’s oldest towns, dating from 700; it was a key outpost during the Viking era.  With cobbled streets and tiny “slips,” or side streets lined with crooked, half-timbered houses clustered between a canal and the massive cathedral on the main square, the city’s heyday in the Middle Ages is easy to visualize.  

By the end of the 16^th century, the royal family had decamped to Copenhagen and a fire had destroyed much of the town. Because of its decline in commercial and political importance, most of Ribe’s buildings remained in their original states; now, more than 100 of its buildings are on Denmark’s register of historic sites. The facades of many of the buildings bear plaques explaining their significance; most were untranslatable (by us!), but we did recognize the birthplace of the American social reformer Jacob Riis on the cathedral square.












We wandered up and down the lanes using a self-guided walking tour brochure (which could have been better organized) and visited the only two churches remaining of the thirteen built before the Reformation, the huge cathedral (originating in the 10^th century, current building dating from the 12th), and St. Catherine’s, originally founded in 1228, when it was built on reclaimed marshland.  After it collapsed, it was rebuilt in the 15^th century.  It’s in a quiet neighborhood, bordered by a row of former almshouses (one of which is the town’s smallest home), a row of beautiful townhomes shaded by large trees, and a quiet square.

When we arrived in Ribe at noon, there was lots of commercial activity, with stores filling the pedestrian streets with their offerings. By the time we left several hours later, most of the businesses had closed for the day.  We’ve read that it’s traditional for small shops to have reduced or no hours on Saturday in this country.

Near Ribe, we found the spot where the canal enters the sea, after passing through a lock.  The land is very low lying and protected by dikes; even so, it is still prone to periodic flooding.  In Ribe’s cathedral, there is a line carved into a pillar marking the water level of a flood surge in 1634 – 20 feet above normal – that killed 16,000 people.

We’ve enjoyed driving through the Danish countryside during the last several days. There are lots of pretty small villages, with occasional houses topped with the most neatly shaped and trimmed thatched roofs we’ve ever seen; they look as if they were plucked from children’s picture books.

In cities, towns, and along rural roads and highways we’ve seen Danes on their bicycles. Roads have dedicated bike lanes, frequently physically separated from car traffic, and they even have their own traffic lights.  On one corner near our apartment, we spotted a mini-self-service bike repair station – a vending machine dispensing tire tubes, tools hanging on a chain, and pressurized air to inflate tires.

Perhaps the Danes are on to something; if we’d been traveling by bike, we’d never have encountered our problem at the gas pump this morning!