September 18th - Good Food

The breakfast in the Best Western is proper hobbit affair. Cereal with milk, yoghurt, seeds, nuts and fruit (including prunes), chilled orange juice, leaf tea and proper tea pots, cold cuts and cheese with pickles and coleslaw, freshly baked loaves of bread, boiled and scrambled eggs and little smoked sausages, toast and ten types of jam. I try not to think about the waste and just enjoy it. My fellow diners are all elderly and rotund. I reflect that a lifetime of breakfasts like this has probably contributed to that and quit after two courses, snaffle some apples for later and go to pack up.
I have an hour before meeting Niels Erik Neilson at the town hall. I had considered trying to make it to the Danish Volkecenter, a Danish version of CAT but it is some distance away and seems to involve a boat trip so the chances of arriving before closing time are slim and tomorrow I have to be in Viborg by early afternoon. I hadn’t planned on another night in Skive – it seemed pretty dead last night, and the most exciting promise for tonight was the English pub which was advertising a ‘ladies rock night’. I found a café that did excellent steak with a mountain of paprika dusted potato wedges and pan fried veg, all in a paprika and mushroom cream sauce. I’d just started eating when I realized that the guys at the table next to me weren’t just talking loudly – they were trying to get my attention. They switched to English and asked if they could sit with me. They’d just sailed from Aalborg to be in Skive for the wooden ship race. This is an annual event and involves over a hundred boats and ships from big 20-man sailing ships to little one-man dinghys and two Viking long boats (full, presumably, of Vikings) There are expected to start arriving today after 3pm, wind (and rowing muscles for the long boats) power depending. Looking on line there’s not much about it apart from a brief note on the Danish tourist board page but flickr has photos of fireworks over a harbour which looks pretty special. And they have Vikings.