By the time we reached Flensburg again, it was our third visit and the city no longer felt like a new destination.
That is one of the strange things about travelling for a long time. A place that originally required maps, parking searches and constant checking gradually becomes somewhere familiar enough that you recognise the roads and know roughly where things are before the navigation system tells you.
Flensburg had already been useful to us for practical reasons. On an earlier visit in July we went to Westerallee to have two of our gas cylinders refilled, one French and one Spanish. The staff were friendly, spoke good English and managed both cylinders without any problems. It was exactly the sort of stop that becomes disproportionately useful during a long motorhome journey.
We also checked several possible parking places around the city during that earlier visit. One on Langberger Weg was between the railway and the small airport and was dirty, noisy and not somewhere where we felt particularly safe. Another on Alter Ochsenweg had good shade but was still too close to a busy road for us to consider it a particularly good longer stop.
So by the third visit we already knew that Flensburg could be very convenient without necessarily being easy for finding the perfect motorhome parking place.
The city itself still makes sense as the transition between Denmark and Germany. It is German, but it never feels completely detached from Denmark. Danish signs, Danish visitors, Danish institutions and the large amount of cross-border shopping make the border much less obvious culturally than it looks on a political map.
For more than four centuries Flensburg was connected with the Danish Crown, and after the Schleswig plebiscite of 1920 it remained on the German side of the new border. A Danish minority still lives in the region, with its own schools and cultural organisations. That mixture is one of the reasons Flensburg does not feel quite like other northern German cities.
The harbour is still the best part of it for us. Flensburg developed at the innermost end of the fjord because this was where land routes and sea transport met. The old port is now much quieter than during the city’s commercial peak, but traditional boats, the museum harbour and the waterfront still make the connection obvious.
Historically Flensburg became particularly wealthy from trade with Scandinavia and, later, from sugar and rum. Ships carried raw rum and sugar products from the Danish West Indies to Europe, and Flensburg became famous for blending and selling rum. Only traces of that industry survive today, but the old warehouses and merchant houses make more sense once you know why they were built.
Our third visit had another unexpected difference.
The CITTI-PARK was open, but its enormous CITTI Markt supermarket was not.
We had already been around this part of Flensburg roughly a month earlier, so finding the supermarket sealed off immediately looked odd. Then we discovered what had happened.
A fire had broken out inside the CITTI Markt in the early hours of 29 July. We had not been there when it happened, but the timing was strange enough because it was only shortly after one of our previous visits to Flensburg.
The fire itself was relatively small, but the consequences were not. It began in the checkout area and produced a large amount of smoke. The sprinkler system activated, the fire doors closed and the fire did not spread through the whole shopping centre, but the supermarket was left with smoke, soot and water damage.
By the time of our third visit, the rest of CITTI-PARK had returned to normal. The shops around it were open and people were moving through the shopping centre as usual, but the supermarket itself remained closed.
That made the visit slightly surreal. Nothing about the wider shopping centre suggested that a serious fire had happened there only a few weeks earlier, yet one of its largest parts was still inaccessible.
It also changed the way we remembered the previous visit. Travelling for long enough means occasionally returning to places after something has happened there: roadworks appear, a parking area changes its rules, a shop closes, or in this case a supermarket we had recently seen ends up behind barriers after a fire.
Flensburg itself remained familiar: the fjord, the harbour, the Danish influence and the slightly awkward search for somewhere sensible to leave a motorhome.
But the third visit had one detail the first two could not have had. We returned to a city we already knew and found that, during the few weeks we had been away, one of the places we recognised had changed completely.