Near the North Sea - Thursday July 15, 2010
After a good night’s sleep in Kiel, along the Baltic Sea, we stopped this morning just a few kms in the town of Molfsee to visit a Pioneer Village called Schleswig-Holsteinisches Freilicht museum. They have collected probably 50 older thatched roof buildings and re-assembled them with furniture and implements as they were 100 - 200 or more years ago. Most of them were house/barn combinations and it was good to see inside how the layout and arrangement of the interior was set up. Usually the house was across one end and occupied less than a ¼ of the entire interior space. In nearly all the structures we saw, a large fireplace was included in the dividing wall between the house and barn. The fireplace was accessed on the barn side but provided heat for both house and barn. The cow stalls and horse stalls were located along the sides of the barn and the middle was left open for implements. Hay storage was above all this including the house providing insulation for both house and barn. Quite clever they were and still are at sharing and using space to best advantage under this large thatched roofs. As we traveled today we saw several loads of bundled reed grasses on transport trucks probably headed to a new thatched structure or to repair some older ones. The thatch is about 1 foot thick and at that thickness would provide good insulation in itself. It was obvious that the village had been there for many years evidenced by the size of the large lemon trees that lined the walkways.
We arrived at out last “stay” here in Klixbull around 3 p.m. Annika and her family were outside to welcome us. She is the daughter - speaks good English and introduced us to her father, her 1 year old daughter and her grand-parents who own the home. Annika does all the bookings and grandma and grandpa provide the space. They have 2 apartments on the 2nd level, complete with kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and living room - one apartment at each end of the house with a common stairway on both levels between. After showing us around, they left for swimming and we settled in. About 5 p.m. we headed out to find some groceries. No stores here in Klixbull but found lots of stores in Niebull about 10 min away. Lots of towns nearby end in ...bull - must find out what that means. We are about 5 kn from the Denmark border and about 7 km from the North Sea on the west. Nice cool breeze here right now for which we are thankful.
