Lake Vanern - well it was Skoghall

Swedish people - can you guess which 2 are related?

So I continue with my blog - I am still behind, but trying to catch up. (there is some photos of Gothenburg in the post below)

We headed to Karlstad to meet with Stefan’s family – Karin. Our drive was quite quick, although our GPS said that it was going to be about 4 hours, it turned out to be about 2 hours 30. We had a few stop-offs as well – but nothing significant to put in here (mainly food). We arrived at our hosts house which would be our home for the next few days, they being Karin and Sofia. We arrived to a very very nice welcome, some drinks, some food and talking for a long time. At this house we couldn’t have felt more welcome, they chatted to us about all sorts of things, made us feel so comfortable. We went to bed late as we were chatting till late. The next morning our plan was to sleep in till lateish and then either go golfing, go boating, or go canoeing. It turned out that we did none of the above, but it still turned out to be a good day. We slept in – me till about 10, Andrew till 12, and then we went to see what to do, Stefan’s brother michael came around and we chatted to him for a while, it was very fun talking to him, he was a Swedish guy with an irish accent. Amusing talking to him, as his language and his language (if you get what I meant) was very irish. We went to go canoeing but they were closed, so we went for a run through the forest which I enjoyed very much, Andrew did also, but boy was he sore the next day. Unlucky. The run through the forsest I thought that I might elaborate a little more on, in Australia running through the bush consists of gravel and eucalyptus trees usually, here it was woodchips, ferns, and pine needles with dead silience again… what is with Europeans having such quiet places to run. Maybe it is because in Australia we have crazy animals making a racket. I unno. We then went to a house party in Sweden, which we met some nice Irish girls, and some nice Swedish people which we chatted with for ages, - in multiple languages. Although our Swedish wasn’t good, (lol) we had fun conversations, about Swedish snow, kick sleds, and towing behind a car on a toboggan!. We then went home – reasonably late and slept in till late. The nexy day I dragged funky out of bed kinda after a morning of researching Copenhagen and seeing if we could spend an extra day at Ripsa – tuscani’s ‘home’ town. We then went canoeing on lake Vanern, which was good. Waves were plentiful for a lake, but still fun. We said a goodbye to Karin and their family – and headed off towards Ripsa, I must mention here that there family were so so nice, they cooked us an awesome meal of moose and potatoes which was great! So delicious, they also let us catch up on some washing, and were just such great hosts, I hope that other people have the pleasure to stay with them. It was also the first real hot meal that we had for a long time. Mmm. Anyway we headed off towards ripsa (a swedish town near Nykoping to see Tuscani, Jo’s daugheter who is currently on exchange in Sweden.

I will leave it there, and let you know about what happened in ripsa tomorrow.