The Update #6 – Did we meet a Moose yet?

This week has been a week with a lot of different things, but let us start where we ended last week. At Lake Vattern in the town of Hjo, you pronounce this as the English word You. That is why this place has the slogan, I love Hjo. Swedish is such a difficult language when it comes to pronunciation. Whenever we try to say something in Swedish, the Swedes already start to giggle before we start speaking. The way that Swedes pronounce the words is so immensely different, we need to let them repeat the names a couple of times to get the hang of it. We quickly learned to start apologizing to the Swedes before we pronounce names because the chance that our pronunciation is wrong is 200%. In Hjo, we stayed on a campsite for the first time. We don’t like to stay on campsides, but there were some practical reason for us to show up here. And from what we have seen from the campsite here, they also look mainly practical. It has no atmosphere and none of the beauty of the places where we normally camp, in nature. However, Jasper was already wearing his boxers inside out, so they needed to be washed. It also rained a lot that day so we couldn’t dry the laundry outside, so we really needed a washer and dryer. The advantage of a well-equipped campsite is that we can make good use of the rest of the practical things. For example, we called our parents with the Wi-Fi and watched YouTube videos. The WiFi only worked in the front part of the van, so we sat in the front seats the whole evening to watch YouTube movies, hahah. Should be funny to watch from the outside. There was also a well-equipped kitchen with an oven so we decided to make the lasagna in the camp kitchen instead of on the van.

The next day we took our time, actually just like all other days so far. The alarm clock is set for around 7:30, we snooze a couple of times till between 8:00 and 8:30. Jasper get’s out of bed first, because in the small space of the van we would be elbowing each other all the time if we put on our clothes and brush our teeth at the same time. The trip might then be very short ?. Jap then boils water for tea and coffee in the meantime. I usually grab my book and read until he is finished. When he is ready I prepare myself together with the rest of the breakfast. Meanwhile Jap has ground his beans for coffee and between 10-11 am we are usually ready to “really start our day”. This may sound like a mega logical rhythm for a holiday, but it usually doesn’t work that way with us. I especially can get very restless from what I call: all that procrastination. As I said in the previous blog, I feel really relaxed and this just goes to show. Slightly less relaxing, however, was that our skylight was wet in one corner. Bummer, again something broken .. Fortunately it turned out to be no real leak, but we had just made a wrong decision. We always sleep with the skylight a little open, but it was windy and raining quite hard at night, so the water has splashed inside the van. Anyway, we removed part of the window so that the wood could dry and it was fixed. After that we had a run to the village to see if it was worth a visit later in the day. We had a nice shower and done all the other chores that are needed when you are living in a van such as emptying the toilet, filling the watertanks and emptying the gray water and so on. During the run Hjo turned out to have a nice center, so we went there for a lunch.

The next stop was a spot nearby, a nature reserve. Very nice place at a lake. We wanted to take a nice walk here, but because it had just started to rain again, we played a game instead. When it stopped raining we walked around the lake. It was a very nice walk. Quite a few fishermen were busy along the shore and even in the water. We had read that you are only allowed to fly fish at this place and cannot use any other techniques and we wondered why. We got the answer from a man we met. It was mainly because there are few places to fly fish while there are many places where you can do the rest. And because this lake is perfectly suited for it, they have made this lake exclusively available for fly fishing. We had already come up with all kinds of theories, the most logical being that fly fishing was perhaps a friendlier technique for the fish. We said this to the fisherman and he rightly said: no girl we do nothing friendly for those fish, they will die anyway and are eaten by me. And he also rubbed his belly when saying this. Hahaha, our theory might not have sounded quite so logical, but it was a noble thought, right? Once back at the bus we decided to fly with the drone at the bridge. So back with the drone to the bridge. When we walked to the bridge, the dog of our neighbors on the campground had escaped and we were able to catch him. We then chatted for a while and continued the conversation together in the evening during diner and for a long time afterwards. They are also on the road for a long time and have a nice old Mercedes bus. Their names where Gerald, Nina and Hedda the sausage dog. Hedda is only 10 months old and really cute and funny.

The next stop was the city of Gothenburg. To be honest, we don’t really like going into town during our travels. We like to have a nice bite to eat and walk around for a while, but cities also automatically mean spending a lot of money. Especially, if you don’t pay attention to it. Besides we already have all the things we need in our van, so we don’t want to spend our money (and space in the van) on shopping. What we also find a bit more complicated about the city is finding a place to safely park Bob. Bob is not very big so we can almost park him everywhere, but we have heard, read and been warned several times about the large numbers of break ins in campers around the big cities in Sweden. But through our campground friends we found a perfect solution. There are many islands around Gothenburg, which you can reach with a free car ferry. They had selected an island, parked their camper there and got a bus, which actually goes on the ferry and it drives you right to the center of Gothenburg. And that place seemed to be safe enough because it is just too much trouble for the thiefs. We waved goodbye to Nina Gerald and Hedda and started driving to Höno. By the way, you pronounce this as Hùneu, with the emphasis on the ù. hahaha impossible right? Next to the camper place was a nature reserve. It was an area of ​​large round rocks that where the cliffs of the coast. You could walk over them from one rock to the other. We sat here for a while looking at the sea. So beautiful. The nice thing about walking here, and we have had this before in Sweden, is that there is not really a path. There are a few pieces here and there that have clearly been walked over, but you are completely free to wander around yourself. It felt like we were on a real adventure, haha. We stayed there for a long time and ended up next to the camper with a bag of chips ? and our books. 

But then it was time for Gothenburg. The bus that would take us directly to Gothenburg left at 9:10 am at the latest. So we were in town early. We first went to the Haga district. This was recommended to us by someone on Instagram and the Lonely Planet. Here where nice cafes for Fika, which set the tone for the rest of the day. We tried not to go shopping but just wander around and had a bite to eat and drink here and there. We sat in the sun at a cafe and enjoyed a cup of coffee and a chai latte with a snack. We looked up a city walk on the internet and followed it. The walk took us through all kinds of nice streets and nice squares with cafes. Because the weather was nice, there were a lot of people on the terraces. This really gave a wonderful atmosphere. We had a lovely stroll around, but mainly drank a lot of coffee and had a delicious lunch with Asian snacks. For the evening we bought a delicious loaf of bread in the Saluhalle and a little present for Bob. A beer opener for on the wall in the shape of a bears head, so a bear beer opener. Very funny. We had a nice day in the city. We took the bus back relatively early and at sunset we went back into the nature reserve and played a bit with the drone.

The island of Höno was connected to a number of other islands that were easy to explore from there. We started the day again with some sports and we made some nice use of the shower. Yes, another shower! It was not possible to camp for free at Höno, so we were on a specific motorhome pitch, but with a nice shower. Then we packed all our stuff back into the camper and went to the other islands. Föto (Fùteu) was the first stop. However, this island felt very familiar as it looked like the smaller version of the island we slept on. A man at the campsite told us that there was no bridge to this island at first and there was a lot of inbreeding then and that when the bridge was build that this bridge was also a kind of gene bridge ?. In the end we drove on quickly because it was not really interesting and went on our way to Rörö (Rùreu), for which we had to take a small ferry. And this island was really very small. On the west side of the island was a nature reserve that takes up a large part of this island and we had a nice walk here. Along the walk there were a lot of beautiful pink flowers and wild violets. This was really beautiful. Because it was so small and again there was no free place to spend the night, we decided not to sleep on the island and went to the mainland in search for a free place to sleep.

We really only went to the mainly for a free place to camp, as the next day we wanted to cross another bridge to the next group of islands. But before we left the mainland we took a nice walk through the woods near the camper place. It was a beautiful area with a lot of greenery. The moss in the woods is really so abundant and it makes walking through the woods like walking on a sponge. It has been very wet the past few days and this was noticeable during the walk. Many of the parts had been turned into large mud pools, which needed climbing and balancing work to prevent our feet from getting too wet. Let us not leave you in the dark to long, we failed hopelessly, there was no escaping the mud or our balancing ability was not up to the task .. Fortunately, it did not rain a lot during the walk despite the terrible forecast.

We are now on the island of Tjörn. No idea how to pronounce it correctly, we are betting on Tjùrn, but there is a good chance that the Tj’s combination will have a completely different pronunciation. Until now, this has been a great cultural experience. We went to the Watercolor Museum where there was an exhibition of the painter Hundertwasser. It was a nice exhibition. Then we went to the sculpture pilane. A “sculpture garden”, it was not really a garden but more sculptures in nature. It was a lot of fun, not all the sculptures were all that appealing to us but it had a nice diversity. This island is connected to the islands of Orust and Skaftö, which we are planning to visit next, but that is for next weeks story.

Of course you have read this piece with lightning speed to find out if we have now met a Moose .. Well the answer is: no.

Bye! Until the next one.

Love

Menu of the week

Spendings of the Week

Budget per day €54 and per week €378 and per month €1700

Route

Driven kilometers: 431