Mons Klint

Our guidebooks described the island of Mons as charming and unspoiled, with beautiful chalk cliffs, and since we have always had an interesting time visiting out-of-the-way islands, we gave it a go. This church is one of three very similar village churches we passed on our drive across the island.





This is the cafeteria (and behind it, the hotel) where we planned to eat and spend the night. It was a great spot... at the end of a dirt road, surrounded by forest, with the cliffs and ocean nearby...but as you can probably guess from the picture, the place was completely abandoned, and looked like it'd been so for a while. That's our rental car, and I look like I am literally tapping my foot with impatience. Oh Lonely Planet, how you failed us!





We decided that since we'd driven all that way, we may as well see the cliffs (which were accessed via a trail behind the hotel) and ran down the 500,000 steps to the lookout so we could get there before the sun went completely down. Thank goodness you can't see how much I am huffing in the picture.




After climbing back up the 500,000 steps to our car, we had a decision to make. We could drive the hour or more back to the highway and then drive until we found a city and a hotel, or we could backtrack to that cute little town we passed through a half hour ago and see if that tiny hotel there was open, (which we were pretty sure it wasn't) or we could check out that slightly strange looking golf hotel we passed by 20 minutes ago. Since it was after 8pm at this point the strange looking golf hotel won, despite a rather shocking room rate and trailer-like building style. This was our first inkling that there is a specific tourist season in that part of the world, and it had ended a few weeks before we got there. I usually prefer traveling in the shoulder or off season, but when it means stuff is closed, well, it just becomes a little more of a challenge. At least dinner was pretty good...though you might not think so from the picture. The plate in front of me is monkfish stuffed with shrimp over veggies and the other is grilled zucchini gratin with dill dressing. Vegetable gratin seemed to be the standard (often the only) vegetarian dish on the menu in the Scandanavian countries.