Baltic Sea: Warm your bottom in the icy sea wind

This summer has spawned a new travel trend: the coolcation. Of course, the only new thing about it is the fashionable term, which, one has to admit, is a very clever choice. Because cool combines a pleasant coolness with a desirable casualness. Merging this with the promising word vacation, i.e. vacation, to form a portmanteau word that was immediately adopted into German usage, the vacation feeling is increased considerably.

Essentially, however, Coolcation means little more than that no one is forced to spend their summer holidays in Crete, Sicily or Antalya in temperatures of 40 degrees or more. And perhaps you should instead consider traveling to – comparatively – cooler holiday regions in the summer, for example to Denmark, Scotland or Brittany, where the thermometer reliably shows less than 30 degrees, even in July and August. The tourism advertising of many regions bordering the Baltic Sea and the North Sea immediately adopted the catchphrase of coolcation. They smell growth because the heat around the Mediterranean is becoming increasingly unbearable. In fact, the number of German holiday guests is growing in Sweden, for example, without all the hotels on Mallorca being completely empty.

What Coolcation doesn’t mean, meanwhile, is a surfing holiday in the Lofoten Islands. The Norwegian archipelago is a great area for surfing, but the water and air temperatures rarely exceed 13 and 15 degrees respectively. Cross-country skiing and dog sledding in Lapland are also not part of the trend. Cool is by no means to be confused with cold.

Which is why a longer stay on the German Baltic Sea coast in summer can definitely be considered a cool-off. Not in November, however, as climate change is fortunately not progressing that quickly. And so in autumn in Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania the pleasant coolness turns into a clammy cold that makes you no longer want to sit or lie down on the beach. The advantage of lower temperatures in summer still turns into a disadvantage in the winter months.

This should now be compensated for by an oversized hot water bottle. It is not filled with hot water but heated with electricity. According to the Ostsee-Holstein Tourism Association, which had this hot water bottle constructed, the consumption corresponds to that of a hairdryer. With this energy, the bright red thing is heated to almost ten degrees more than the current outside temperature. The great thing about this five by two meter hot water bottle is that not only one person can put it on their stomach, but one to two dozen people can sit on it to warm their bottoms in the icy sea winds.

Over the winter she will stop at various beaches, in Travemünde, Fehmarn, Timmendorfer Strand, Eutin, Plön, Heiligenhafen, Großenbrode, Scharbeutz and finally Kellenhusen. In this way, the Baltic Sea coast becomes a cooling destination all year round, i.e. a travel destination with moderate temperatures. While the winter temperature records on Mallorca and the Canary Islands are inexorably approaching the 30 degree mark with each new December.