Aviation Tour - Maps on www.bankleft.com: Kolding

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Kolding

While we were filing a flight plan in the pilot lounge on Bornholm a few months ago, we met Family Wagner. Morten, Brigitte and their three children spent a year flying all around Africa and were impressed to hear about our trip. We each had scheduled departures, us north to Sweden and them east on holiday to Lithuania so we exchanged cards and agreed to catch up if possible.

H and I wanted to hear about the African trip and spend some time with like minded people so when Morten invited us to stay with their family at their B&B, we planned a return north to Denmark for a week.

These guys are dynamic – the pace of their family life was awesome. Morten oversees their farming interests in Lithuania and works for the local regional bank, business consulting to their clients. Brigitta and Mort have just spent 3 years personally hand building their house and it is marvellous – arranged with the garages and B&B around a courtyard in classic Danish style, it has sweeply expansive open planned living spaces, a lovely 360 degree fireplace and state of the art "smart home" technology. Every light, power point, applicance, and heating service is cabled back to the space above their garage (more than 7km of cable) where each is individually IP addressed. Long story short, Morton can dim the garage lighting from his ipad while he, us and 60 of the family's closests friends are having a sit down BBQ there on Friday night. Nice. More practically, when you leave the house, you swipe your fingerprint on the reader and if you are the last person leaving (sensors detect), all lights are turned off and heating is switched to standby. Easy. With a small amount of thought about the arrangement of modern lighting, the idea of selecting a pre-set 'mode' for the space's overall combination of lighting works vastly more effectively than the obviously redundant traditional alternative of manually switching one particular light.

Mid morning coffee with Morton talking to me and the Wagner's neighbours across the table. The neighbours are rebuilding their house and showed us how to tile a bathroom.

Brigitta's father helped set up the local museum. Here she is pointing out the grinder that she remembers from her childhood;

I gave a talk about our construction and trip at the local areo club. Here we are checking out the plane;

We were pointed toward the nearby museum, Trapholt which has an excellent Danish chair collection and the original Arne Jacobsen summer cottage, a very early small modular building system designed for manufacture.

The Trapholt collection is housed in a brilliant architectural building. As with all true triumphs of the profession, the roof leaks (note baskets suspended below the light sections of the egg carton cast concrete ceiling);

We saw an A380 fly by at the near by international airport and more importantly.... LEGO LAND!

Are those birds pixelated?

We saw these classic KZ Danish gliders at many clubs - here is the Lego designer's tribute;

Here I am refuelling the plane the old school way, using car petrol in this way can save us 40% of our fuel costs which are 60% of our trip budget. We have to be careful about contamination and ethanol content though (alcohol's low vapour pressure can cause vapour lock in hot engine bays on hot days or at high altitude);

Morten took us to see the local chapter of a very successful youth program that the area runs. Chaired by Mort, the system has multiple sites where all the youth come every night for a combination of classes about interesting and practical things (art, scooter maintenance, deisgn, cooking) as well as just hanging out together, doing karayoke, playing pool and network PC games. Most notable was the way that the adults treated the young people as adults and were similarly accorded human respect. Instead of running around the street or staying at home, these regional Danish locals have a selection of warm supervised places where they can meet, learn, play and behave like socialised humans. Helen and I think that Denmark is a good place to grow up. You really get a feeling walking around and talking to people that there is a real human respect for other people. It is evident in the air, on the road, in shops, when you make mistakes and when you ask for help.

Here is Brigitta with some Danish birthday bolla, just as we ate at Storm's first birthday in Copenhagen. These ones were in recognition of the Wagner's absent cousin's birthday.

After a great week in Kolding we had to head south to Switzerland, 5 hrs of flying, to catch Helen's family there before they head over to Australia for European winter. Long flight? This is first class comfort Bank Left style. The funniest thing is having to fall out of the plane on to the apron in front of the refuellers upon arrival;

We discovered an awesome castle on the flight south. Do you think they'll let us keep it?

What a great castle!

We stopped at Frankfurt to meet Vincent who I'd been emailing about flying in Switzerland. He is a really interesting guy who works on the technical side of air traffic control systems and recently made an American flying trip, coast to coast and back again trip. We'll definitely catch up again.

Here we are at our destination, Constance airfield. It is the closest airfield to Helen's family's place in Switzerland, and turns out to be a lovely grass strip right in town on Bodensee (lake Constance);