For the first time in more than a decade I get to celebrate Spring Break. I managed to finagle the time away from my work obligations and my wife recently went back to school so we are taking a week and heading out on the road. For many people that means beach or ski time. Not for us. We’re going to Northern Germany and the Jutland side of Denmark. It is a research trip for her and I’m just along for the ride. Not that there was any chance of my skipping the trip.
The itinerary is reasonably aggressive given the timeframe, but we have a lot of ground to cover in a reasonably short amount of time. Hildesheim, Germany is our first stop, thanks to its medieval history roots. That it has a couple UNESCO World Heritage Sites doesn’t detract in any way from its appeal. From there we’re headed up to Hannover because, well, it is on the way to Hamburg where we’re flying out of after our few days in Germany.
The second half of the trip has us in Denmark, flying in to Aarhus and out of Aalborg. We’ll be driving around a bit, visiting the coast and making our way up to the town of Skagen at the far north point of the Jutland peninsula. I’m a bit worried about the driving experience in Denmark (mostly due to costs and less about the manual transmission or which side of the road they drive on) but that’ll likely be fine, right??
The flights are reasonably straight-forward, at least by my standards. We fly JFK-Frankfurt-Hannover on a combination of Singapore Air and Lufthansa. From there it is mostly SAS moving us about in the region (Hamburg-Copenhagen-Aarhus) and then back to London where we switch to United Airlines for the ride home (Aalborg-Copenhagen-London-Newark). There were a few other more ridiculous options I chose not to take. Even without that five of the seven routes are new ones for me.
It is going to be a great trip (and, as a bit of a teaser, I’m actually a couple days in already and it IS a great trip) so follow along…
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That sounds great, road trip thru Germany & Denmark. I look forward to the trip report, have fun!
We’re doing trains in Germany (they are far too efficient not to). Our stops in Denmark are way too spread out for public transit to work. Mutliple tight transfers with 2 hour waits if we missed would have been too limiting. Winning a free rental car from Avis really helped make that part of the trip affordable. Probably saved $400+!
How many miles did you use in booking it?
This trip was booked using United points to maximize the open-jaw/stopover benefits. Due to inventory (and point balance) limits we are traveling in coach on this one. The total was 60k points and a hair under $200 per person in taxes/fees. The retail price of a return trip close to the itinerary (but without the HAM-AAR segment) was north of $1000 so, while not the absolute best valuation of points, still pretty solid IMO.
with few exceptions, they only drive on the “wrong” side in the UK (and former UK possessions)
It sounds like you will only be driving in Jutland, so I you don’t have to worry about the great belt bridge ($40 each way) or other toll roads. Do book your car from a non-danish website, as you are entitled to rent cars where the rental agency have not paid taxes on the car. This tax issue makes it significant cheaper to rent a car there. In Billund airport I have rented cars at a net expensive of 400 DKK per day (< $80) and that is about as cheap as it will get in that part of the world.
Yes, only in Jutland, so that will help a bit. And I won a free weekend rental from Avis which somehow they’re letting me apply to a Sunday-Wednesday trip so the car itself is actually free for me. Otherwise I was looking at around $400 on that front. Quite a nice chunk of change to save, really.