I’m glad that we missed the bus. Missing the bus meant walking, and walking—despite looking very, very far on the map—turned out to be a pleasant stroll through fields, between water and trees, cows and grazing sheep.

We had arrived in Schleswig—an itty-bitty coastal town in northern Germany—the night before, and we were on our way to the Haithabu Viking Museum and the neighboring reconstructed Viking village.

Haithabu, an area now referred to as Haddeby on modern maps and bus schedules, is considered one of the most important Viking settlements in northern Europe, its port a center of trade and activity, and one of the oldest. Now almost a century of archeological finds from the original village’s site can be viewed in the museum: pots and bowls, weapons, jewelry, and bits of cloth. From these artifacts archeologists have constructed a detailed picture of Viking life for museum visitors, which after a short walk through more fields and woods, is brought to life in the reconstructed settlement.

In the seven reconstructed buildings we looked at Viking bedding (furs on top of piles of hay) and Viking ovens (clay kilns both indoors and out), Viking kitchens (low stone and clay rectangles places in the middle of the sleeping quarters) and Viking dining rooms (a long hall with simple tables and benches). In one house were looms, strung in the style of the day, in another an actor dressed in period clothing carving knife and axe handles.

It turned out that almost everything in Schleswig is close enough to walk to, even easier on bike. I had never been so far north before, never seen the steely gray waters of the Ostsee. The air was damp and crisp, oscillating between gray rainy skies and white fluffy clouds punctuating a blue heaven. Narrow streets and orange-roofed cottages fill the city, and you are never very far from the water—a fjord that the town of Schleswig wraps itself around, U-shaped. And for a town of only 24,000 inhabitants it offered a surprising variety of “attractions” for the touristy types.

The Outsider Art Museum (that we missed because of bad timing) and Schloss Gottorf, whose four-floor museum of art, antiques, anthropology (currently featuring the reindeer farmers of the north), and grandiose rooms from the building’s royal days which we spent three hours wandering through. A grand cathedral (Schleswiger Dom) and an active theater. And not one, not two, but SEVEN museums, four second hand stores (my personal favorite, when it comes to souvenirs and a towns’ current cultural anthropology), and Thor’s Schmiede, a Viking paraphernalia store that provided my visiting mother with a bag full of books and memorabilia to happily collect and bring back with her to America.

For more on the city check out the city website at www.schleswig.de (in German) or the Wikipedia site at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig .