Hope the trip was worth it.

As I boarded the train south to Århus from Aalborg I noticed a number of people getting on who had obviously just come from the airport and were heading deeper into Denmark and it reminded me of the lady I had seen at the baggage reclaim belt at Aalborg on Sunday.

Her bag came off just before mine, and as she was taking it off the belt it was pretty obvious that she had just come off of a mammoth trip.

I think the longest tag I’ve ever had has had two airport names on it (Tallinn via Helsinki, Hammerfest via Tromso) but this lady had two tags on her bag as one was full and they had had to go onto a second tag.

In order the tags were LAX, FRA, CPH, AAL. In short to get to Aalborg airport at 1pm on a Sunday afternoon she had come into Aalborg on the flight from Copenhagen, where she had arrived from Copenhagen, where she had arrived from Frankfurt, where she had arrive from Los Angeles, where she had arrived from who knows where.

Firstly I dread to think how long she had been travelling and I hope that the trip was worth it, and secondly it shows that the system does work. The bag was loaded into the system at an airport somewhere within a single flight of Los Angeles and has transited through three separate airports never once missing the connecting flight.

What’s the betting that if one of those flights had been with British Airways that the bag would currently be going round the baggage carousel in Kuala Lumpur with the confused baggage handlers going, Aalborg, Aalborg, where the hell is Aalborg?

Out of the Darkness, Light

Denmark suffered, for five years (the Dark Years as I have heard them described on a number of occasions) the land was under the control of Nazi Germany.

As with other places they invaded the Nazi’s wanted to protect their gains, and where there were coasts involved keep them secure.

And nowhere needed to be kept more secure than Grenen at the top of the country.

At Grenen the Skagerrak and the Kattegat meet. These are the entries (or exits) from the North and Baltic sea respectively and so a vital area to control.

With carefully built fortifications and big enough guns you can stop anything you don’t want entering the Baltic Sea entering.

Move forward over 60 years and the sand dunes on this part of the coast have helped Mother Nature reclaim most of the area, with many of the fortifications long since buried and slowly being crushed by the dunes.

But a couple of the bunkers have survived and today they are still serving their original duty of providing excellent views over the peninsular, only today rather than Guns it’s camera’s firing off regularly as holiday makers clamber over the ruins to reach their roofs for the views.

I hope they are just errors

I have a lot of respect for the people who have to write guidebooks. The have to do a lot of work, much of which ends up getting condensed into a short sentence. Perhaps not quite as bad as the Hitchikers guide to the Galaxy where the whole of the earth is condensed into the phrase “Mostly Harmless”, but it still must be quite hard and at times pretty unrewarding (especially if you’ve got lumbered with updating the guidebook to a crime riddled dump, not that anyone has published a guide book to Croydon yet!)

However, occasionally, I’ve come across real howlers of errors that have caused me to think that not much research has gone into some sections. Today I think I may have come across one such incident.

I’m not going to name the guidebook series, but the errors imply that there is a chance the person doing the work either forgot to check when they were in Aalborg, or never even went.

The first error was the frequency of busses from the airport. The guidebook said every 15-30 minutes, it’s actually every 60 minutes.

The second error was on the opening times of the Aalborg tower, they claimed during July it’s open until 7pm every day, except at the tower they show they close at 5pm every day.

I actually asked the person at the tower about this and they gave an explanation which slightly concerns me:
They have never been open to 7pm, but they did, a few years ago, for a couple of weeks, have an error on their website which said they were open until 7pm, rather than 5pm.

Looking at the website for the local bus company you can see that there are buses on route 2 every 15 minutes during the main part of a weekday, but route 2 splits and goes to various different places, only some of the buses actually serve the airport.

I have a nasty feeling that a lot of the research might have been gleaned from the internet without being checked for accuracy or that they were even reading the correct information.

I would gladly like to be proved wrong, but at the moment, I’m not convinced.