10th June. Sweden Rock Day Two, Sölvesborg, Sweden

Needless to say we didn’t get up until 11 a.m and because the weather was a bit rainy we decided to chill out in the van until 5 p.m then made our way to the festival, however halfway to the arena we realised I’d taken the memory card out of the camera earlier so we walked back to the van to get it, that was a lucky move because no sooner had we stepped into the van than the heavens opened!

We looked at the rain and made the executive decision to stay in the van until it had stopped, which is what we did.

We didn’t have to wait long before we ventured out again.

We arrived in time to watch The Temperance Movement who were so good we stayed and watched them even when it started to rain again, we just snuggled up in our waterproof coats and waited for the rain to stop.  It was gone in 20 minutes and we had nice weather for the rest of the evening.

The highlight of my evening was a visit to the Nordic Street Food stall.  We weren’t really sure what they sold but there was something on the menu that looked like it said asparagus (sparris), it was spargel in Germany and asperge in the Netherlands so we were getting quite confused.  We stood in the queue and watched people to see what they ordered.  The man behind the counter was very helpful and gave us a run down on what food they had to offer, he told us he’d taken the stall to festivals in the UK the previous summer and they’d won the award for the best food stall which sounded promising.

I had a wrap filled with asparagus, pickled cabbage and tarragon mayonnaise, it was superb and Darren had a lamb burger which he thoroughly enjoyed too.  While we were waiting to order the people behind us heard us speaking English and started chatting to us.  One of them was Norwegian and the other two were Swedes.  The Swedish man told us that Swedes are extremely good at queuing which explains why every time we’ve joined a queue it’s been so civilised.  We said that the British are renowned for loving to queue and he told me the queuing was appalling when he was in the UK, that’s very sad to hear, I thought we had a reputation for being good at queuing.

His Norwegian friend told us we will love Norway because it’s very beautiful, I’m looking forward to that, I can’t imagine how it can get any more beautiful than the landscape we’ve seen already, but I keep being told it can.

As we were walking away from the stall with our food another Swedish lady heard us talking and she came over and started chatting with us, she was very excited that we’d come to her country to their festival and she desperately wanted her husband to come over to talk with us but he was already deeply in conversation with someone else and he eventually got cross with her and told her to go away, she was very apologetic when she came back and she gave us both a big hug  (which wasn’t as easy as it should have been as we were carrying rucksacks, fold up chairs and had a cup of coffee in one hand and our food in the other!) before she said goodbye.

We opened the seats up and sat down to eat our meal which was well worth the wait.  I decided I was definitely having another one before the end of the festival, if it hadn’t been so expensive I would have had LOADS more before the end of the festival!

When we went back to the van that night we decided if you can’t beat them join them and instead of trying to sleep through the noise we lowered our ‘lounge’, made ourselves comfy with food and beer and watched loads of episodes of Vikings before falling asleep in the early hours of the morning.