Just when we thought we had seen it all.

A band serenaded us on our arrival into port.

And a group of locals dressed up in costume and greeted us also.

A first anyplace in the world.

Real city pride!

The town of Fredericia is a 5-minute walk from our ship. Between the ship and the town, however, was a really interesting community project. In a large, undeveloped area there must have been a hundred-plus open wood boxes about 4 feet square. Most of them were filled with soil and had flowers or vegetables growing in them. We could see people watering these container gardens and chatting away. The town itself is tiny. You could cover the whole place in a couple of hours or so at pub-crawl speed. But the town is picturesque, lively and very friendly.

Again, the old is mixed with the new.

The main street/town center has historical buildings interspersed with buildings that definitely look post WW II. In the downtown center, there are less than a dozen cross streets and say ten main intersections. Public art is everywhere, mostly statues and water fountains. We should have asked someone why there were bronze sculptures of penguins next to a water feature outside what looked like a municipal building.

I was in charge of the map. I checked where we were at every intersection. The sidewalks have a red dotted line drawn down the center that is keyed to the tourist map (the only other place I have seen anything like this was Boston which uses a different color brick to accomplish the same thing).

I still led us in the exactly opposite direction we were supposed to be going for several blocks!

We still don′t know what this means.

Fredericia, like virtually every city we have seen on this trip, was once a fortress town. But here they did something different: the walls surrounding the city were not stone but earthworks.

In fact, the whole layout looked like it belonged in our Revolutionary war period (including the uniform on the bronze statue).

            

This is our last port-of-call. Tomorrow we arrive at Copenhagen and transfer to the airport for the long journey home.

It′s been fun.

But…

California here we come.