Skagen - standing at the edge where the world stops

The landscape reflects the Scandinavian aesthetic - flat, white, simple. The fine sand sparkles in subdued ripples marred by smooth hollows of older footsteps and sharper outlines left by today's visitors. The sky is simply too vast for me to bother attempting to capture it in a meager lens, so I don't mourn the fact that my camera died. The atmosphere is a hovering dome, bleached out around the edges. The ships at the edge of the horizon must be immense, but they appear as nothing more than cheap plastic toys bobbing at the other end of the bathtub.

The northernmost point of this country truly ends in a triangular tip at the end of a narrow stretch of sand extending to divide the two oceans. These opposing seas are constantly kissing and slapping like lovers, the dominant Atlantic rushing in from the west with its roaring crests, the gentler Baltic, a shade greener, patting out frothy subtleties on the eastern shore.

Gammel Dansk is passed around to toast this miracle of continuity. I swallow my shot of bitters and, knocked back by the shock of the ancient herbs and the force of the melding east and westward winds, let my travel-sore heels sink into the softening shards of white sand on this Arctic beach.