9th. Maddox family arrive.

Simon phoned me at about 1030 to say that they were here. Well at the airport. I’d previously told him where we were but he wanted me to share my location. I thought, I can manage this. It turned out, I could. I had to go to you tube for some obscure reason and choose 92 but it worked. In the meantime I had a last minute tidy and went to the clubhouse for when they arrived, arriving, probably a little early. As I got there I saw a package, leaning against the chandlery looking suspiciously like a solar panel. As I thought I had about 10 minutes I went into the chandlery and said I was hoping to pick up the solar panel and thought it was there. The nice chap disappeared and nothing happened. I glanced out of door and saw the taxi arrive so went outside and there were Simon and  Lauren with their children Esme, Henry and Alice, so we all went hail, well met and so on and went to the boat where, because we are bows to and not really rigged for bow access had a bit of a pantomime as everyone clambered aboard through the pulpit in different ways with Alice, 9 opting to climb through the bottom.

Once they’d all found cabins and we’d dumped stuff and I’d picked up the the solar panel with apologies for being late,  we pottered off to the local bakery for brunch as they had had an early start and eaten nothing since the previous evening. We had a mixture of breads cinamon rolls and fritata at the bakery and then, as it was hot and Simon assured us that there was no chance of rain, Lauren decided to go back to the boat with the girls to change them into skirts out of jeans as it was quite hot.

From here we had a nice walk, along the river, harbour side past either a Naval or Merchant Naval college, a tall ship and various house boats and  other nauticalia to the opera house where I knew we could get a water taxi which I thought would be fun. The taxi came and we had more presbyincompetence as we tried to buy tickets on line for the journey with mixed success, me buying a day pass and simon a single ticket for everyone. I managed to miss the whole boat ride with my head buried in my phone. Arriving at the main canal we got off and had a walk past lots of Tin Tin type sailing  boats tied up along the canalside past millions of other tourists and thousands of cafes, restaurants and bars. There were water tours in big low boats which Simon thought would be fun so we queued up and bought tickets for a tour, we just missed the one leaving and the following one was going to be an open boar leaving in 20 minutes with the one after being a covered boat leaving in 40 minutes. The significance of this was that it was just starting to rain. Simon opted for the covered one and we left and went back to the touristy street and, just as it started to absolutely pour down, dived into a basement bar which was, strangely, empty. We expected it to fill up with other rain refugees but it didn’t. There was no one at the bar. We sat in nice leather seats at polished tables and waited and no one came but the rain continued. After about 15 minutes someone came in and said this half was closed. We looked at going to the other half but it was full so sheltered half in the door way and back in the leather chairs until the rain eased and it was time to go on the tour.

The tour was, actually, excellent, it mostly rained but when it wasn’t raining we could open the windows and had a good tour of the waterways of Copenhagen past the various sites including the Royal Yacht, apparently the oldest one still around, (thanks for that Mr Blair).

From here it was necessary to buy a fridge magnet with a Danish flag on it and a sweatshirt with Copenhagen on it so we found the required shop just off the main tourist street, went a couple of streets back and then having walked for a bit were returning to the touristy bit for some refreshment when we spotted a Banksy / street art exhibition. Having had some refreshments in a bar, it appeared that Henry was quite keen on Banksy so we split into two groups, boys and girls and we boys went to see the exhibition and the girls looked at other shops. The exhibition was good, I’ve never known much about Banksy other than through Patrick. There were several of his works along with various other ‘Street Artists’  and lo and behold at one of them - a picture of a rioter throwing a bunch of flowers, it turned out that it had been first seen at ‘The Severnshed’ at an early exhibition of his works (The Severnshed is a restaurant Patrick set up having restored the shed in Bristol Harbour where it is based), so that was quite impressive.

The exhibition itself was interesting and fun, far more thought provoking than the installations I’d seen at the contemporary arts museum but, again, it was all very well put together and presented.

From here we walked back to the  amazing food from all the world street food market quite close to the boat where we had a selection of Italian, Argentinian, Turkish and …. I’m not quite sure what, a fish or seafood and chips selection box. with fish and seafood tempura in it. All good but as it was not so warm by now we left shortly after eating this and went back to the boat I rigged the solar panel and then we spotted climbers on the power station, it appears that they’ve made the outside of it the tallest climbing wall in the known universe or possibly Denmark but it’s pretty impressive. Then after a wine,   Simon was banished to the saloon because of a danger of snoring and we all went to bed.