Island in the Sea

We left Copenhagen after breakfast and Jan’s suggestion of ‘showing a couple of pears something of the world’ i.e. taking them out of the restaurant for the journey would have been successful had I not noticed that they were hard enough to inflict serious injury to anything with lesser resilience than steel!
Here now started my big mistake! I replaced the full memory card in my camera with a new one. As you all know (if you have been paying attention), a whole set of pictures went for the crapper do to a faulty (i.e. this one) card.
I could gorram spit but that would not bring the pictures back and might be seen as unbecoming!
So the pictures you won’t see here are the ones from the journey to Luebeck, all photos from Hamburg and our boat trip on the Alster and through the canals of Hamburg and most photos from the island of Baltrum, including the ones where we were in a sand storm on the beach, me braving waves the size of houses and of course the pictures of me on the nudist beach (only kidding – can you imagine?? Please don’t!).














Baltrum is a very small Frisian island in the North Sea and part of a chain of islands dotted across the German mainland. You get there by leaving your car securely parked on the mainland and taking the boat across to this totally car-free piece of heaven.
The beach there is lovely. Clean, soft sand and the sea slopes gently away. Walking, swimming and sun-bathing are the main pastimes here and everybody seems relaxed and friendly.
It is a strange thing but the moment you set foot on this island, your trouble seem to vanish. . . . . unless of course you are a Muppet call Erik, who handed his suitcase to be delivered to the Sea Hotel rather than the Beach Hotel and then has to run after the guy, who by this time is already half way there! But, running does me good and as my Dad would always say: “What you haven’t got in your head, you need to have in your legs!”

On the island we had all weather imaginable; sun, rain, storm, fog and I am sure snow would have been next, had we stayed any longer.

The bonus of the storm was that the waves were enormous and various guests at the hotel remarked on the fact that they were bewildered to see me diving through them, asking if I was not cold and/or scared to be washed away.
I told them that because I have the same body fat of a sea lion these things don’t worry me and they seem to nod in agreement (gorram cheek of it all).

The reason for visiting this place was that I used to come here between the ages of 5 and 12 and I was just curious if it was still as nice as I remembered it.
There were a few more houses but in essence everything was just like before.
Without cars, computers, television and other potentially stressing things, time on that island goes slowly and having walked, swam and sun-bathed all day, we usually called it a day at 8 p.m.!!! How mad is that????

Anyway, without boring you too much, here are some pictures which survived!

For a selection of photos from Baltrum click here
(Use the Slideshow facility or click photos to enlarge)