Wanderung 30

Our room at the Dittmer hotel came complete with a morning breakfast buffet that included the traditional German buffet of bread, cheese, eggs, bacon, yogurt, and assorted fruit. We very much enjoyed having a full but leisurely breakfast before setting out for the day. The swelling in Monika's right eye and cheek was going down, thankfully, and although she clearly was still in no shape for bicycle riding, after a nice breakfast she did feel energetic enough for doing a walkabout.

While walking along the harbor the previous day, we had seen the schedule for an excursion boat that offered to ferry passengers down the fjord to Glueckstadt on a regular schedule. Using Hotel Dittmer's Wifi, we had found there was a palace of the old German nobility just outside Glueckstadt called Gluecksburg that was nowadays open as a museum for tourists, and we decided to make an outing to see that.

The first step was to walk over to the harbor in time to catch the 9:30 excursion. Our ship left promptly and followed the northern edge of the fjord (bordering Denmark) for a few kilometers so that we could get a peek at a couple of small Danish islands lying just off the coast, before turning South across the fjord to dock at Glueckstadt about an hour later. As we neared the harbor we saw a bunch of little sailboats engaging in a regatta, but also a larger, sloop-rigged sailing ship with square topsails (topsail schooner?) that was anchored just offshore outside the small sailboat marina. I was curious about the large ship as it seemed too old to be a private yacht and too big to be feasibly maintained by one person, suggesting that it was a commercial sailing ship of some kind.

Landing at the Glueckstadt dock around 10:30, we first walked a bit westward around the marina, where we got a better look at that sailing ship. Turning inland, we then wandered uphill past what had to be the world's smallest planetarium, past the town and along some poorly-marked forest paths in the general direction of the palace. We finally found the large fish-raising pond cum moat that surrounds the palace, affording us a rather dramatic view of its stone walls and graceful towers from across the water. We later found out that the pond had been constructed by flooding the ruins of an old Catholic abbey, which had fallen into disuse after the Protestant Reformation.

We walked around the pond, payed for our tickets, and started our tour of the Gluecksburg Palace around 11:30. The palace was quite large and fancy as it had first been the seat of the local Danish nobility and then local German nobility, as the province of Schleswig changed hands from Danish to German control. The last shift had occurred in the 1920s when the people of Schleswig had been given a plebiscite to finally decide to be either under Danish or German rule, and had chosen to be a part of Germany.

Gluecksburg palace was in a beautiful state of preservation, with a lot of rooms carefully decorated with furniture and even manikins dressed in costumes from the last active period of its use, which was in the 1920s and 30s. The downstairs chapel, in fact, was still in occassional use as a venue for celebrating weddings. We both thought it was quite a pretty little chapel, although maximum capacity would be only 100 or so, I think.

The upstairs ballroom still had a wood parquet floor, and we all had to don felt boots to walk around it and see the exhibits in the side rooms, which included many beautiful tapestries as well as the usual oil paintings of the noble family and beautiful wood furniture. One room had a huge, long table decorated with the palace place settings and silverware, plus a full compliment of manikins formally dressed in period costumes, as if having a formal dinner. Cute!

But two parts of the palace exhibits were quite unique, at least in my experience. First, we saw some unusual and perfectly preserved painted leather wall surfaces in one room, and I was surprised that leather would keep paint on it that well. Second was a whole set of exhibits in one section about the life of the staff and workers who had kept the palace actually running and served the needs of the nobles and their family. Focusing on the working class is not typically a part of any royal tour, and I found it was a refreshing balance to the fancy lifestyles of the "rich and famous" nobles, in the same fashion that the black slave quarters are a necessary balance to seeing the fancy lifestyle of George Washington that is depicted at his Mount Vernon estate.

But after two hours of exploring all the nooks and crannies of Gluecksburg palace, we were both getting really hungry. There is no place to eat right around the palace, so we had to trudge back to Glueckstadt to find a restaurant near the pier. Unfortunately, we took a wrong turn and had to backtrack, so it took us almost an hour to get back to the pier and we only had 15 minutes to gobble down a lunch before taking the 2:30 excursion ship back to Flensburg. Gosh, how I hate to have to eat in a hurry--it brings back memories of my Army days where we were fed well but only given 10-15 minutes to eat our meals, which was very unhealthy.

The trip back was as much fun as getting there. As we passed from the end of the fjord into Flensberg's harbor, we passed just offshore of the rather impressive German Naval Academy that has been used since 1910. As our excursion ship pulled up to its dock in the harbor, it was fun seeing the docked ships from the water.

We rested on the 45 minute trip back to Flensburg, of course, but we still had to walk the kilometer or so from the harbor back to our room at the Dittmer Hotel, and we were just exhausted when we finally got back around 4 p..m. So we put our feet up and played on our IPads for a couple hours, and then collapsed for the night.