CRF: The Best Of Liechtenstein

"CRF" is not a crime show you've never heard of, it stands for "Cutting Room Floor." It's been more than a year since we returned from Europe, and we've started to get seriously nostalgic.  To give us all an extra travel fix, we're posting some of our favorite photos that never made it onto the blog.  Here are our favorite unpublished memories and pictures of Liechtenstein - a tiny, odd, forgotten place.

These Swiss browns with Switzerland in the backdrop were photographed from a berggasthaus just like the ones we'd hiked to in the Appenzell Mountains.  We were carrying Swiss francs in our wallets at the time and trying to speak Swiss German.  Surprise! Du bist nicht in der Schweiz!
Liechtenstein might not look like much on a map, it doesn't have its own language or currency, but we left The Principality with a real sense that we'd visited a country all its own.  Sure, there are more registered businesses than there are citizens, but this tiny country's identity as an unlikely survivor rings truer than its status as a tax haven.

Not to say you're left to forget that Liechtenstein has the highest GDP per person in the world, the world's lowest external debt and Europe's wealthiest ruler.  It feels moneyed in the capital, Vaduz, even if it also feels like a farm town.
Their National Museum had one of the finest Natural History exhibits we've ever seen, anywhere.  Their Kunstmuseum is world-class and their ski museum and stamp collections are as cluttered and quirky as can be.  The public spaces are filled with art.  If there was a roundabout, it had a sculpture at its center.  The capital's center plaza was sleek and modern, though very tiny.

The food was... expensive and alpine.  There were some great local specialties at the Bauernmarkt, Weinfest Trieson, Sommernachtsfest and at "Oldie Night," but we otherwise had little success eating well.  We did cook some great forellen und rösti, and had plenty of camping picnics, but white asparagus toasts in aspic aren't our idea of inspiring, even if they did come with a squirt of mayonnaise and a bit of pickle.

The heat at the end of August, dusty with the last cuts of hay, drove us to the water.  The Rhine is too swift and sharp-bottomed to swim in, but there were plenty of pools.

Liechtenstein isn't tiny tiny, by microstate standards.  At 61.78 square miles, it's about three hundred and sixty three times larger than Vatican City - but that's like comparing grapes and poppy seeds.  In terms of micro-ness, it's closest to San Marino, though Liechtenstein's still over two and a half times larger.

Still, it's the third smallest place we visited on the trip, and every larger country felt a LOT larger.  You can walk across Liechtenstein in a day.  Luxembourg, which many people confuse with Liechtenstein, is sixteen times larger, and has a functioning train system.

This greenhouse was situated alongside our walking path from campsite to capital.  The walk took less than an hour and covered more than a quarter of the country's length.

But that's on the flats along the Rhine river valley.  Along the Austrian border on the other side of the country - locally referred to as the "Oberland" - Liechtenstein is mountainous and harder to get around.  We spent a sunny day hiking the ski resort of Malbun and watching a falconry show, and another few days on a long, trans-nation hike.  The peaks here are part of the Western Rhaetian Alps. Cowbells clanked on the summer breeze.

One of the trip's wierd animal experiences was at "BIRKA Bird Paradise," a zoo-like aviary that we never really figured out.  There were plenty of parrots and chickens, but who the heck knows why they were there?
In some ways, Liechtenstein feels a bit like a roadstop along the expanse of our trip.  We visited just after returning from a trip back home - we flew back into Ljubljana airport, where we'd left our car, and drove up into the Austrian Alps feeling excited and full of energy.  Two weeks later, we left Liechtenstein bemused and restless, driving on to France and broader horizons.  What had we seen?  What had we done?  Walked, looked at postage stamps, wandered around a garden, gotten confused, felt hemmed-in - and seen some strange birds.  It's not that it wasn't pleasant, it's just that we wanted to get back on the road.

There's a romantic myth about Europe: that it's filled with tiny kingdoms, where princes and kings and queens sit in their castles, ignored by the rest of the world.  Two and a half centuries ago, before Napoleon and the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, there really were little duchies and comtés scattered amongst and beside the major countries - in Germany alone there were around 300 sovereign states.
Today, almost all of those little kingdoms are gone, and you'll find only three micro-states ruled by royal families: Luxembourg (which isn't really that micro), Monaco (which can hardly be called a forgotten kingdom) and Liechtenstein.  In a lot of ways, this little place is a unique throwback.

Approaching Vaduz, a traveler passes through farms and orderly vineyards.  The mountains rise to one side, very green and lush in the late summer, but topped by glaciers and distant rocks. There's a quaint little castle just above town, where a real prince lives.  A few Victorian-Gothic steeples rise above the beech treetops.  It looks, from afar, just like the capital of a fairytale, middle-european, lost-principality should look.
Of course, close up, it's full of Toyota dealerships, pizza places, bank buildings and shopping complexes.  Theres too much traffic and not enough places to park.  If modern concrete is your thing, maybe you'll like it. If you want to visit a peaceful principality town, though, avoid the capital.  You can stay anywhere else in the country and still drive to Vaduz in twenty minutes, if you feel like it.  Better yet, take the bus.
This picture was taken at dusk from a third story window of the one old Inn still left in town, Gasthof Löwen.  The timber-framed building has literally been walled in by roads and development.  On the last night in the country, we went to sleep under the eaves, listening to the grumbling roundabout outside in the night, dreaming of bigger places to explore.

To see all of our posts about Liechtenstein, just click here.

Our 10 Most Popular Posts

Here's the travel blogging catch-22.  Most people are looking for information about places they plan to visit.  So, millions of people search for things about Tuscany, Paris or Amsterdam's canals.  The most amazing place on earth won't receive much traffic if nobody knows about it.  The problem is, the more popular a place is, the more bloggers there are writing about it.  The chance that someone reads your post about the Acropolis? Slim.

Predicting which of our 700 (plus) posts would get read was almost impossible.  Some of the best things we wrote didn't even get read by our own parents.  Some of our silliest or worst-written bits have became enormously (and embarrassingly) popular.

Our 10 most popular posts (based on Google analytics data and Blogger.com traffic reports) are a mixed bag.  Some are good (number one, thankfully), some began their online life as throwaways (see number nine), some are just weird (number five).  Only one of these posts was specifically designed to attract traffic (number two).

10. Cihangir

Sometimes we just hit upon something. Cihangir is a hip, young Istanbul neighborhood.  It reminded us of a Turkish Williamsburg and confirmed our belief that renting an apartment is the best way to see a city.  The best neighborhoods are often the best because they don't have any hotels.  Don't get us wrong, the center of Istanbul is as gobsmacking is you'd expect and we never tired of tooling around in search of balik ekmek or The Mussel Man (who we wind up finding in Cihangir anyway).  But the best cities are great because of their ever-changing qualities, their momentum and the neighborhoods defined by the young people there at a given time. 

9. Not Taking Pictures of The Sistine Chapel

As bloggers, we found ourselves in a jam.  Here we were in Vatican City, two whole weeks of posting about a very, very small microstate and the pièce de résistance was off limits.  No photos in the Sistine Chapel.  Seriously?  If this were a rule decreed by the pope, the security guards would probably have worked a little harder - or at all - to enforce it.  As it turns out, a Japanese TV company owns the exclusive rights to some of the art world's most famous images because they funded its restoration. (This is after NBC turned down the deal.  Probably because they were too busy fine-tuning  Joey, the Friends spin-off).  Anyway, the whole thing was ridiculous, made only more so by the fact that everyone. was. taking. pictures.  So, we decided to half break the rules and snap some shots, too.  Just not of the ceiling.  We're sure this gets traffic because people are searching to see if photos are allowed in the Sistine Chapel.  Not that finding out is going to stop them.  

8. Georgian Food
We can vouch for the fact that it is very difficult to search for anything about Georgia, in English, without being directed to the state instead of the country.  Using the word "Georgian" helps matters a lot.  This one makes us happy because Georgian food really did feel like a revelation.  The textures and flavors were consistently surprising and delicious.  Pomegranate seeds, crushed walnuts, cilantro,  the best bread of our lives.  And then there were khinkali, the soup dumpling like concoctions pictured above.  In the tiny town of Mestia, at the time the most remote place we'd been, the only restaurant in town basically only served khinkali   We discovered, quickly, that they are so delicious you don't need anything more.

7. The Bright Spots

Amazingly, this is only our second most-popular Albanian post (see below!)  

Sometimes we know exactly why people are reading a specific post.  After a TED Blog writer used our photos of Tirana's painted buildings we got a sudden surge of visitors.

The story of Edi Rama (painter turned Minister of Culture turned mayor) and his brilliant idea to transform ugly communist-era cement blocks into bold, bright works of art is a great one.  It's no wonder it's garnered some attention.  We're just happy that our own piece focuses more on the story of the city today and of Malvin, a young man who served us dinner one night and was showing us around the next.  Maybe he'll stumble upon the post himself and shoot us an email.  We wonder if he ever made it to that bioengineering school in Canada.

6. Castle Hunting: Trakai Castle
Island castles are a little bit of a trend (see number 4).
We remember this castle most for the speeding ticket we got nearby.  Lithuanian police take road safety very seriously.  For the record, if you should ever find yourself stopped by an officer in Lithuania, be prepared to pay your fine in cash on the spot.  If you don't have the money, he/she will drive you to the nearest bank to withdraw the amount.  Don't be scared.  This is absolutely normal.  Well, you can still be scared.  As we were.

5. Sleeping In Soviet Style
This little Belarusian piece has always baffled us.  For almost a year it was our number two most-viewed post, second only to this, about Belarusian tractors (which now ranks about 12th).  It would make sense if people were only landing here while looking for lodging in Belarus - which is hard to find - but that didn't seem to be the case.  Inexplicably, thousands of people showed up after searching for "armenian elevator buttons."  The internet is a weird, weird place.
(Thanks to one visitor, we learned that what we thought was a very cool smoke detector was actually an even cooler single-channel radio from the Soviet age).

4. Castle Hunting: Kizkalesi Castles

We were never even supposed to be there in Kizkalesi, but we were finding it a little difficult to catch a boat to northern Cyprus, and we needed a place to stay.  For a Turkish seaside town, it's a little drab.  People visit for the "floating" castle (and visit our blog for pictures of it).  We stayed in an empty hotel, run by a very nice Kurdish man who took us to the nearby Caves of Heaven and Hell and invited us to watch a televised NBA game with him in the evening. 

3. Lithuanian Food
For a long time, Lithuanian Food was the most viewed post on the blog.  It features grainy, unappealing photos of cepelinai, blyneliai and various other cheesy, gloppy dishes.  This is a poorly-lit shot of kiaulės audis, which is smoked pig's ear.  We had no idea - as we crunched cartilage on that dark night in the Žemaitija National Park - that so many people would find this stuff interesting.  Then, again, we may not have ordered the smoked pig's ear if we didn't at least hope they would.

2. Montenegro's Best Beaches
Some day soon, this will be the most read merlinandrebecca.com post.  It's been popular since day one, and it does really well around every vacation time.  Montenegro is newly independent and popular, so there isn't as much written about it as, say, Croatia.  We think that's why readers end up on our site.  This one feels a little bittersweet, though, because we created it while thinking "this will get so much traffic!"  But, hey, the hope is that then you stumble upon something like this.  The other hope is that more people will look beyond the big resorts that are threatening to destroy the coastline and find those little places that remain untouched… for now.

1. Albanian Food

While it's not too surprising that 3 of our 10 most popular posts are about food, Albania sneaking in for the win is a bit of a shock.  Here's our theory:  there's simply not much information available online about Albanian food.  So, unlike a search for "Italian food," you're more likely to stumble upon us.  In fact, googling those two words right now, we're right there behind wikipedia, food.com, ask.com and pinterest (which may or may not have even existed when we published this post).  If the title had been "Frogs Legs and Lamb's Head" - as I'm sure at least one of us wanted it to be - there's no way this would be our number one.  But… hey… we learned a few traffic tips along the way.  Now, add the fact that Albania was named Lonely Planet's Top Destination for 2011 and you've got yourself a winner!

CRF: The Best Of Slovakia

"CRF" is not a crime show you've never heard of, it stands for "Cutting Room Floor." It's been almost a year since we returned from Europe, and we've started to get seriously nostalgic.  To give us all an extra travel fix, we're posting some of our favorite photos that never made it onto the blog.  Here are our favorite unpublished memories and pictures of Slovakia.
There are lots of Slovak trucks on the roads of Europe, and it's well known as the "other half" of Czechoslovakia, but it's still a little-known, hidden away country.  Crossing from the Czech Republic, we descended into a rougher land, spiked with tall pines and criss-crossed with big rivers - Slovakia smells first of wet woods and coarse paprika.
But there are also elegant promenades and beautiful towns, great museums and copper steeples.  One of our favorite towns was our last, the charming Banská Štiavnica in the south-west of the country.  This intriguing "plague tower" shone brightly in the middle of Trojičné námestie square.
At the technical museum, in Košice, we got lost in the dark, wonderful rooms.  Outside, the city was full of music and weddings, but the world contained in those dusty hallways was a silent one.  Displays of prickling antennae, bare wires, worn typewriter keys, dull lenses, remote controls - and what seemed like a hundred gramophone speakers.
Slovakia was a prickle of peaks and forests in the western part of the country.  At first, as we climbed in from the Czech Republic, the whole landscape was made of wood and stone.  It was wild.  We passed a shepherd once, standing in the mist by his flock, who wore brown robes of sheepskin that reached all the way to the ground.  He stared at us in the alpine cloud, leaning on his crook.  At that moment, Slovakia felt like part of the untamed past.
On the other hand, the middle of the country is flat and hot.  The land there is a continuation of the great Hungarian puszta, and the roads stretch out simple, flat and dusty.  We ate oil-slicked, paprika chicken soup at this restaurant, in the heart of the plain.  A thin, aproned Roma woman served us.  Across the road, a shanty village glowered.  Kids kicked at trash, the streets were full of brown water.  We stopped for not much more than an hour. The food was delicious and hearty, as it tended to be in Slovakia.
At "Theatur" bar, in Košice (not the gambling den pictured here), we had a long discussion about martinis.  Mainly, we talked about how good Theatur's martinis were - the young, blond bartender shrugged when we complimented her work.  "I didn't even try," she said. We agreed, after much discussion, that they were the best drinks we'd had in months, and were probably the best to be found within two hundred miles.
Košice is full of good food and exciting things.  It's also has - like so many regional hubs in ex-communist backwaters - its share of red neon and bleak-faced vagrants.
When we stayed in the forested hamlet of Podlesok, there wasn't much light at night save for the moon and stars.   In Slovenský Raj Národný Park (home to the slippery, scary Suchá Belá waterfall course) we saw men logging with horses and clearing weeds with scythes.  This was the edge of modernity, where tradition and machinery were meeting each other in the forest.
Ovčí syr (Slovak sheep cheese) can be so dry and thready that it almost feels like fiber on the tongue.  The tendrils squeak in your teeth. The texture is both bouncy and melting. Forget bryndzové halušky, this is Slovakia's real national flavor.
(Actually, bryndzové halušky is just potato dumplings with bryndza - one type of ovčí syr.  So, really...)
It was June when we visited Slovakia, so our memories are of summer heat, the sound of bugs, the intense green of early wheat and the yellow of rapeseed.  The days were long.  We ate picnics beside country roads, smelling pollen on the wind.
We spent one hot afternoon walking around Levoča, a pretty village with an imposing town wall and almost no people in the streets.  Slovakia evokes as much central-European grandeur as any of its neighbors (see Bojnice castle, the incredible ceilings inside or the ancient edifice of Spišský Hrad), but has many fewer tourists than the Czech Republic or Hungary.
Levoča has medieval history, UNESCO listed carvings and dark little cafes set in crumbling stone buildings - but, at the time, it was all ours.
To see all of our posts from Slovakia, just click here.
To see other Cutting Room Floor posts, with lots of other great pictures, just click here.

You Are What You Sit On

The Swedes may have given the world IKEA, but the Danes gave us all a place to sit.  Sure, chairs existed before the Danish design movement, but the idea of what a chair was or looked like was vastly different.  To be fair, it really started with the Germans.  Danish furniture makers were highly influenced by the Bauhaus school in Germany which, from 1919 - 1933, taught a revolutionary style of furniture design that mixed craftsmanship with fine arts, encouraging creativity, but also keeping human proportions, modern materials and technique top of mind.  The even greater 'gift' (I really hesitate to use that word) from Germany, when it comes to Danish furniture design, was World War II.  Denmark was relatively unscathed, the rest of Europe was looking for cheaper, simpler products and plywood construction became the start of a Danish empire on four legs.

It's amazing how little you think of designs that have become so mainstream they are simply the default.  For example, we have missed Q-Tips deeply since beginning this trip, never really realizing that "cotton swabs" are just not the same.  If I saw the above chair in a home, I might think "nice chairs."  Maybe.  If I saw it in a store, I would recognize that it's a perfect version of chair that I may want for my own home.  In a museum,  specifically Trapholt in Kolding, I realized that this chair is a work of art that didn't just always exist.  The fathers of Modern Danish chair design were (or worked closely with) cabinetmakers.  Lighter woods, function and simplicity, the idea that the piece would fit into the personal world of its owner all factored in.  Thoughtful craftsmanship was key.

Arne Jacobsen, Kaare Klint, Hans Wegner, Verner Panton led the wave of design, teaching and studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Art.  They were commissioned by hotels to make one-of-a-kind furniture.  Wegner's Round Chair became known simply as The Chair after it was used by Nixon and Kennedy in one of their historic, televised debates.   Jacobsen's The Egg and The Swan are icons of modern design and his stackable Ant Chair was so popular that it became Denmark's first industrially manufactured chair.  Above, Ant chairs fill Trapholt's museum cafe.

Finn Juhl was a little more radical than his Danish design contemporaries.  The Pelican Chair, strung up in a colorful array at Trapholt's exhibit commemorating what would have been Juhl's 100th birthday, was called "aesthetics in the worst possible sense of the word" when it debuted.  A great artist panned during his lifetime? Shocking.  What I found more shocking, though, was that this and other curvaceous and plush, colorful and space-age designs were created in the early 1940s.  Looks that I associate with the swinging 60s or the groovy 70s predated both by my entire lifespan.  Juhl may not be the most influential of the chair designers, but he is credited with bringing modern Danish design to America, where it gained instant popularity and still flies off the shelves.

The above Ball Chair was actually designed by a Finn (Eero Saarinen), but when you read the architect's account of his process, you see why Trapholt would include it in a retrospective about Danish design.  With all of its whimsy, uniqueness and its futuristic feel, the chair's dimensions were still based on the most functional of factors.  "Being the taller one of us, I sat... and my wife drew the course of my head on the wall,"  Saarinen explained.  From there, it was simple enough to make a ball "just remembering that the chair would have to fit through a doorway."  It's the art of making something completely logical look and feel imaginative.

The thing about chairs is that, more than any other piece of furniture design, it just won't catch on unless it's truly functional.  You can own a table and define its use by what it can handle.  Lamps, shelves, they serve functions, but there's really no wrong way to do them.  Chairs have to hold weight, they have to be comfortable, they have to fit the owner's taste and also their frame.  Imagine a world where chairs didn't stack or swivel, weren't light enough to move with one hand or inexpensive enough to buy in large matching sets.  Then, thank Denmark.  (with a shout-out to Germany, Finland and the US).

The Great Dane

Less grim than the Brothers Grimm, more lucid than Dr. Suess, an actual person (unlike Mother Goose), Hans Christian Andersen was a master of fairytales.  His works have been translated into 160 language dialects and have been rehashed, updated, paraphrased, quoted and borrowed for nearly two centuries.  Some of his stories are so woven into popular culture that they've become figures of speech, illustrations of some of life's most pervasive themes.  The naked, duped, leader in the Emperor's New Clothes is the archetype of vanity.  The Ugly Duckling's triumph over bullying is the original It Gets Better.

"It doesn't matter about being born in a duckyard, as long as you are hatched from a swan's egg!" The Ugly Duckling, 1843.   Andersen's duckyard was Odense, where he was born to a poor cobbler There are places and things names after Anderson throughout Denmark, but the greatest congestion of tributes is here in his hometown.  On a Saturday afternoon, we joined the rush at Den Grimme Ælling ('The Ugly Duckling') which was serving a brunch buffet of epic proportions.  The 'all you can drink' period was just ending, but the servings of pork crackling, smoked salmon and fried eggs were being replenished with fervor.

Odense is a charming, livable town with a strong attachment to its famous son.  There are statues of some of his best known characters scattered around town, a large statue of him in the park.  There is the big, wonderful Hans Christian Andersen Museum and a smaller collection within his childhood home.  My favorite tribute was Odense's Walk/Don't Walk signs.  The little green man wore a top hat and held a cane, no doubt an impression of Hans' silhouette.

The Hans Christian Andersen Museums itself was fun to explore.  My knowledge of the author came from childhood viewings of Hans Christian Andersen starring Danny Kaye.  The movie-musical was as much a work of fiction as Thumbelina or The Princess and the Pea, but the fact that all of these stories sprung from the mind of a single man still resonated with me.  As it turns out, the real HC was much more interesting than the Kaye version.  He was a paranoid neurotic who traveled with a big rope because he was convinced he'd need to escape a hotel fire.  When pen wasn't being put to paper, his high-speed creative mind found an outlet in paper cutting.  Think snowflakes gone beautifully mad.  His nose was big, his feet were bigger, he abstained from sex and had infatuations with both genders.  In a questionnaire, he answered "Fresh Air" for his "Favorite Perfume."  This 'fresh air room' in the museum celebrated his love of outdoor introspection.

Other answers in the questionnaire included "to be happy" for "Dream in Life" and "contentment" for "Your Idea of Happiness."  The museum had a pair of old dentures, as lifelong toothaches kept him constantly ill at ease and these 3D portraits that you could view through stereoscopes.  Beyond these, there were hundreds of portraits of the author around the space and quotes from friends saying that no photo or painting ever really looked like him because he'd always try to put on a 'dignified pose.'  In that same questionnaire, he answered "Hans Christian Andersen" for "Who would you most like to be if not yourself?"  It's a good guess that he never really saw himself as the swan. 

For all his eccentricities and depressive moods, he appeared to be well loved by everyone he met.  Dignitaries and royals fawned upon him.  Before he ever published a word, chance encounters with nobles resulted in scholarship to school and connections in Copenhagen.  There was the Charles Dickens debacle, when Hans accepted an invitation to dinner and then stayed for five months.  He had no idea why Charles never returned his calls afterwards.  But mostly, he was adored worldwide.  It actually took Denmark a little longer to recognize their own genius, but once they did, he became a local hero.  Above, a 3D statue of Hans Christian Andersen at Legoland.

From the very start and until the very end, the greatest love for Hans came from children who ate up each new collection of fairy tales as they were published.  It was fitting that our trip to Odense coincided with the last day of the week-long Harry Potter Festival.  Children ran around in costumes playing a game I don't know how to spell because I've never read the books (blasphemy!)   Andersen enjoyed a notoriety akin to Rowling's.  When a nasty rumor started about Andersen being destitute and ill, children in America began a collection and a big wad of US cash arrived in an envelope.  On his deathbed, once he was actually ill but still not destitute, Hans requested that his funeral march be composed to "keep time with little steps" because "most of the people that will walk after me will be children."

Of course, there's a kid in all of us, right?  (Hence our visit to aforementioned Legoland, which will be covered in more depth soon).  The tourists taking photos at the little mermaid statue in Copenhagen may not even know the origins of the character or the author of the tale.  Disney gave her red hair, a purple shell bra and a happy ending, but Hans Christian Andersen gave her to the world as a version of himself.  In that same questionnaire posted in the Hans Christian Andersen Museum,  he was asked to state his occupation.  "Dreaming life away."

A Collection of Collections

Pieces of the only surviving gown belonging to Marie Antoinette.  A u-boat reconnaissance helicopter. Four hedgerow mazes. A museum dedicated to old groceries.  Another museum of Falck rescue vehicles, another of dolls, a barn of old farm equipment, more than a hundred motorcycles, planes, Parisian dresses, American cars, African shields, scent gardens, comic strips, folding campers, novelty bicycles, rare stamps, Japanese lanterns, chicken coops, treetop walkways, license plates, hotdog stands, cursed figures, impala heads... even Dracula's crypt!  It's all at Egeskov Slot, one of the most interesting and strange places we've ever walked around.  Containing no less than eight on-site museums, this is a castle experience that only just begins with bricks and arrow slits.

Egeskov castle lies at the end of a long, treelined allé in the flat countryside of Funen Island.  It's an interesting structure (billed as "Europe's best preserved renaissance water castle") that we'd come to for a castle-hunting post.  The sky was grey, though, and the light was too flat for good pictures. Funen - sometime's called "Denmark's larder" - is a low, central isle covered in beet fields and dotted with beef cows.  We passed thatched roofs and half-timbered houses on our way to the castle, all cloaked with fog and buffeted by the damp sea-wind.
If the weather was disappointing, what we found wasn't.  Let's put it this way: we arrived at Egeskov a few minutes before the gates opened at 10:00.  We left at three-thirty, half an hour before closing.  And there was still more to see.  Here, a remote-controlled, steam-powered toy boat splashes and puffs its way around the castle lake.  It let out intermittent whistles and made a delightfully self-important gurgling, chugging sound.

The name Egeskov means "oak forest," which refers to the one thousand oak pilings that the castle is built on.  Originally constructed in 1554, the fortifications are actually on the surface of the water - surprisingly, it hasn't sunk much in the centuries since.  The sight is staggering even in dim conditions - it's the kind of place one assumes couldn't really exist.*
The castle's biggest enthusiast, probably, is the current owner and inhabitant, Count Michael Ahlefeldt-Laurvig-Bille.  He appears on the castle website, in the brochures and in several on-site videos.  His exploits are told and retold on different info-boards: he rescued an ancient Harley Davidson from a recluse's garage, he built the world's biggest maze, he "thoroughly explored" the castle moat (Michael's a "keen diver") and dredged up old plates and canons.  We laughed when we read this bit of pomp on the official website: "Legend has it that, in the mid 1960s, a boy was born to the name Michael Ahlefeldt-Laurvig-Bille. Today he is the Count at Egeskov and lives in Egeskov itself."

*Not only does it exist - there are TWO Egeskov's.  A one-to-one replica was built as part of the Hokkaido Aquarium, in Japan, which is truly bizarre.  

We laughed again when we read about the count's very own suit of armor (the same one he wears on the website).  An information board tells how having the armor made fulfilled "a childhood dream" for the count.  Supposedly, it's an exact replica of the suit worn by a distant ancestor, Frands Brockenhuus - we're betting that old Frands also had a taste for the dramatic, because the piece was absolutely festooned with weaponry and covered in gold details.
Egeskov - the building - is packed to the rafters with bits and pieces from several lifetimes of collecting. The bottom floor is given over, in large part, to hunting trophies from the current count's grandfather.  Under the eaves is a strange array of windup toys and an impressive model train.  There's victorian cookware, furniture from the court of Louis XVI, old paintings, several pianos, aspic molds, rare books, metal chests, family trees and louche knick-knacks. The staff does an admirable job of dusting, but the place still feels a bit like an overcrowded antiques shop.

Fittingly, the prize attraction at Egeskov is another overstuffed house... this time in miniature.  Titania's palace is advertised as "probably the most fairytale dolls' house in the world," which is actually a bit of an understatement.  Dreamed up and built by the Englishman Sir Nevile Wilkinson for his daughter, Gwendolyn, the palace is crammed with minuscule artifacts collected over fifteen years.  The world's smallest working church organ, for example, and several dozen rare, coin-sized books.  In all, there are over three thousand pieces in the doll house.  Tiny photographs, little snowshoes, mahogany furniture, bathtubs, teddybears the size of ladybugs, porcelain figurines and potted plants fill the 18 rooms.  The decorative style is pure victorian overstuff.  It draws a crowd.

Count Michael's parents had already opened up the family home to paying visitors in the 1980's, and one has to assume that the 200,000 annual visitors are let in to pay for upkeep - it's not a cheap ticket, castles (especially ones built on the water) are expensive to maintain.  We couldn't help but wonder, though, if our host didn't relish the attention.
For all his boasting, Michael has made his home really fun.  A birdsong walk snakes through the treetops (like a small-scale baumkronenpfad), there are stilts to use, a maze to explore and, of course, Dracula's crypt... which could never be adequately explained.  The exhibits are so diverse that it would be impossible to visit and not find something of interest.  If motorcycles aren't your thing, you might like the French fashion magazine illustrations or the old harvesting machines.

The end of October is a slow time in Denmark.  The country's tourist attractions are winding up their summer hours, the days are getting dark and short, the country roads are nearly deserted.  We toured Egeskov on the last day of autumn break, before all the schoolchildren headed back to their desks and their parents went back to work.  It was Egeskov's last day open until spring.  A few special exhibitions were going on - in the Falck museum, some remote-controlled truck devotees were driving and talking about their semis.  In the main barn, where the bulk of the airplanes and cars are kept, a model steam and gas engine show was happening.  Stacks of Popular Mechanic lay on the tables next to working airplane miniatures and chuffing steam cranks.
The cars were an eclectic mix of Detroit (lots of Cadillacs and Fords), Germany (especially Mercedes) and some more exotic brands (Ferrari, Morgan, a schoolbus-sized Rolls Royce, electric one-seaters, Danish bubble cars).  Overhead hung an ultralight and a few small airplanes, a float helicopter sat on the mezzanine, rickshaws and camper vans crowded into the corners.

Such is the breadth of Egeskov's collections that some pretty serious contrasts happen in the spaces where two museums collide.  Troll dolls rub up against bicycles, kitchen pots are hung next to spring-powered monkeys, hunting trophies bristle on the same wall as collectable postage.  There are even little mini-collections that seemingly have no real place, and so are stashed away in some incongruous spot.  In the middle of the motorcycles, for example, we found a display of wooden farm animals.  Here, plastic dolls surround one of half a dozen campers.

What do you do when you inherit a family castle, your parents collections, your grandparents cars, ancestral hedgerows and formal gardens?  It must, in some ways, be tempting to sell the whole thing and walk away from the junk and the cobwebs, the headache of keeping everything dry and upright.  Or, as many European castle owners do, rent the pile out to vacationing oligarchs and live somewhere else. Count Michael seems like a different sort, though. He's not only embraced the chaos, he's added to it - particularly in the motorcycle department.
When we caught the bus back to our seaside rooming house, we wondered what the place is like in the offseason.  Egeskov is technically closed from now until April, but it's still a home.  We pictured the count (and countess, Michael is married) roaming the hallways, dreaming up new exhibits and scarier touches for his crypt, starting up his motorcycles and sitting in the old cars.  We wondered if he skated on the frozen moat or ate dinner in the big feasting hall.  It must feel very empty once all the tourists have left and the staff's gone home.  When you live in a museum, do you prefer to have it full of people or all to yourself?