bit behind

The mother of all cannonrides!

Tame Sheep - note the rocks and grass - that was the whole island.

Note very interesting - but this was how the food was set out.

Bridge on the way to the island.

Hey hey – it has been a lazy couple of weeks with the blog. Apologies to anyone who actually reads this.

I am struggling to keep up with everything and something had to give, my blog was one of the things that suffered. So, we currently are driving from Karlstad (well a town called skoghall with a lovely family there) to go to meet Tuscany!

But I will start back where I left.

We left Stockholm to go to a town called Linkoping (pronounced Lin-shoping) (o in show) to meet Stefan and Jenny, members of couch surfing I had contacted many many months ago. We had lunch (bread and cheese, which has been easily 75% of our diet since we left Holland. – interesting that we are eating more cheese now we have left Holland… Anyway we arrived to Stefan’s place to Stefan sitting on the balcony saying – “Hi bruce bruce bruce” now that was weird – only later did we find out that “bruce bruce bruce” is from a monty python skit. We were warmly welcomed and chatted to him – we all seemed to be pretty tired for some reason, maybe traveling does take it out of you more than we think.. But – onward we went, Jenny his Girlfriend came home, and she was tired (not even in the same league as us) because she had been at a horse show all day (would you not be tired cause you were riding the horse all day? *kidding) and was a little delirious which was funny.

Stefan took us into town for a few drinks, and to our amusement and annoyance, they tried to charge us an entry fee to the pubs… grrr – it was 120 Krona. (15 AUD) stupid Sweden. It is not like drinks are free inside or anything. We found another place that was admittedly quieter but cheaper to get into, and talked about a lot of things, I love talking to people and finding out new things about people and cultures. We stayed out quite late (3am) for two reasons – 1. Jenny had to be up at 4am to go prepare the horses again for the next day, and 2. We lost track of time. Enough about random evenings though, the next day was pretty much a write-off, we watched tv, watched Stefan play the computer, researched a lot of things on the internet. It was nice to spend some time doing ‘nothing’ I guess, cause you need a recharge day every now and again. That day was our recharge day. The next day which datewise was the (  15^th) I planned germany almost in 2 hours. Or a proposed itinerary anyway and then we took off (late – 4.00) We were driving  to find a spot to camp (supposed to be a nice area) and it was raining very heavy(the night before I had sent a couchsurfing request to a person that is in-between the two big lakes in Sweden (the massive ones) and I only got a reply when we had found a place to camp (not our best choice of places) even though we could of gone then to meet her, we chose to stay at the camp site as the rain had eased. We quickly put up our tent, I manged to get a fire going with some wet wood, and we had a nice evening sitting around the fire. We also had the owner come past and politely request that we don’t burn her house down, which was a reasonable request I thought J (we couldn’t see her house)

The next morning we saw a castle, and I realised that I just didn’t care about the castle or the history that came with it. It was called Lakco Slott ( I assume slot must mean castle or something in Swedish?). The castle wasn’t impressive, we had seen bigger better ones in Luxembourg, and the information was in Swedish, the garden which you had to pay to go into was poor (it was just a garden!) So we had a brief look around and hit the road again – towards Gothenburg. We stopped at a town called Trollhatten, this was much nicer, we stopped to see a series of lochs and the water being released to form some rapids. Kinda cool, it was finished as soon as it started, which wasn’t such a bad thing as Tarks had to catch a train to Copenhagen to fly to France. So we dropped tarks off at the station – tarks phone was flat so he couldn’t get his online ticket haha. But he made the train and Andrew and me were going to see Ver, our next couchsurfing host at a Japanese Anime get together. (the description of event  that I was given was as follows) people get together and watch movies, play games or just chat. Well after finding a park… grr @ gothenburg’s parking officers, we arrived to be feeling very very out of place, not having dyed hair, long baggy jeans, a piercing, or anything else that seemed mandatory to be here. Sore thumb stickout… We were thankful in a way that we left with Ver to watch some music. So after talking with ver and his friend Thomas who also was staying with him for a night, we went off and saw some slow drumming and a lacklustre carney performance. (juggling, magic and some Englishman make some bad jokes at the expense of the Swedish crowd.) The bad things was that they kept waiting and upselling the next trick that they were going to do. JUST DO THE TRICK ALREADY!!! GRRRRRRR. But it was something to watch.  The funny thing was that we were at yet another random festival. J (there was stalls, music etc everywhere. Called kaltrefestival or something like that.

We took a tram into the middle of the city, and we were treated to a great great time, there was food stalls everywhere, my inner fat man screamed for joy, all the major countries were represented, so we had german sausages, French chocolate, thai curry, aussie bbq burgers, English fudge,  Dutch small pancakes (icing sugar and lemon juice on pancakes everyone!!!*5), crepes from somewhere and polish stew with cabbage. This was over two days, so it wasn’t one sitting!

Then we went to the maritime museum in Gothernburg. I really enjoyed it as I hadn’t seen/been on a warship before, it wasn’t modern (1970’s) but it was modern enough, and the guns were big enough. We also got to walk inside a submarine. Sub life must have not been a job for the claustrophobic! Not a lot of space to move around down there, although it wasn’t as small as I thought. Compared to the submarine, On the ship there was much more room, had rooms to eat, not just a small pop out table like on a sailing boat. I got a couple of illegal, but fun cannon (well it was more like a jet rocket)looking shots also! We met ver after his work, and we went and saw the same semi entertaining circus folk as the night before – ver went home early the night before.  We has a nice evening talking to Ver, he was really nothing like us, which made it all the more interesting. We asked Ver if we could spend another night as he strongly suggested that we go out and see the islands to the west of Gothenburg. So we took off the next  day to see and walk around the island. We saw and walked around the no car island, it was not really that interesting, it was peaceful, but if we were in a bad mood, I think we could have hated it as there was nothing to do there. But it was a nice walk, we saw some very tame sheep and some cool houses. The contrast between the city and the islands was remarkable. One was like an island in Asia, the other was a bustling student city. We were going to play board games that night with a couch surfing group in the city, but we couldn’t really be bothered, plus our tyre had gone flat again. So we put the spare tyre on – which was probably a good choice because the tread was low. I haven’t written much about the countryside in Sweden, but there is a good reason for this, it seems almost too similar to Australia. (north isn’t) but in the south, it’s just normal. Maybe I’ve been in Europe too long to notice the differences. (it is green though) Ver had 3 people from Slovenia stay at his house that night which was very fun, they stayed the next day which was raining, as we watched the hawks beat carlton. They had never seen/heard of the game before, if you get a chance, look up on youtube “Japanese pole game” which was our halftime entertainment. Looks fun and crazy! So we missed a stuffed blue whale which would have been cool, but we would rather watch the game and talk to the Slovenian people than try and hike around the city in the rain. We left to go to – weirdly enough stefan’s mum’s house – which lives near Karlstad a town on the north shore of Lake Vanern. We said goodbye and a small stopoff at the supermarket and we were on our way again. I will finish this and put in some photos later on today