The Viking Museum in Roskilde, Denmark

 We traveled via bus, then train from Billund to Copenhagen. And I'll write all about Copenhagen in another post. But a day trip from Copenhagen was to Roskilde to the Viking Museum.

We took the train (approx 40 min) and then walked about 15+ min to the museum, via the cathedral. The weather was sunny, warm and delightful. Roskilde is a lovely town with a pleasant vibe, green space, and waterfront. 

There was some Tour-de-France excitement in this town

We haven't really done any "Viking" things in Scandanavia yet, knowing that this museum was coming. The focus is on the Viking ships.

Learning how rope is made

Trying out my roping skills

Arm wrestling competition

We pre-booked a cool opportunity to row/sail in a Viking ship. The boat filled up so we were glad to pre-book. There were about 24 people on our ship, which was very similar to a Viking ship but actually from the Faroe Islands. We met our skipper and first mate, grabbed some PFDs, and got into our ship.

We were given instructions on how to row our giant oars and set out, rowing as a group out of the harbour.

A bunch of tourists rowing a big boat together without any practice? We weren't very good at our timing - people were all over the place - but we got the ship moving quite quickly and it was fun.

Once we were out of the harbour, we put up the sail. Certain people in certain seats had more work to do. Our family helped with what we could, but really just sat back and enjoyed the ride. We sailed along peacefully in the sun for a while, then turned around and sailed back in to the harbour.

All in all, it was a really fun experience and a beautiful way to enjoy our experience and sort of pretend to be vikings.

We ate at the yummy cafe. Ava had fresh shrimp, Jason had an open face sandwich with ox sausage, I had a delicious salmon salad, and Rachel had a halibut sandwich. All delicious!

Then we did some Viking training. We did tug-of-war, we threw 'Thor's hammer', and we wore chain mail and held the heavy weapons. Chain mail, if you've never worn any, really is enormously heavy. And those helmets - hard to see and hard to move around in! 

Who do you think makes the best Viking in our family?

Inside the museum, we saw many old Viking ships and enjoyed a kids mystery activity.

Outside again, before we could go home, we had to build our own little wooden ships. So the kids ended up with some more sawing and hammering!

By this time we were tired and hot and ready to go back to our hostel in Copenhagen. We ended up being at the museum from about 10:30am-3pm, and really enjoyed it. 

Our train ride back to the city ended up being quite full of students and commuters, which was one of the few times on the trip so far that we felt like we were in any kind of a big city.

More on the city of Copenhagen and our #mojofamilyadventures to come!