11th June 2016. Sweden Rock The Last Day, Sölvesborg, Sweden.

We woke up late yet again, lazed around in the van and went out in the evening, first stop The Nordic Food Stall for another asparagus wrap, I couldn’t bear the thought of not having another of those.

We hadn’t heard of most of the bands playing the festival but all of the bands we saw were very good.  There was a tribute spoken about Lemmy from Motörhead who had died a few months earlier.

However the best band of the whole weekend was the Swedish band Sabaton who closed the event.  Their show was absolutely out of this world.  They started by singing Status Quo’s “In The Army Now” and as we walked towards the stage to get a better look thousands of people around us were singing along to the chorus, it was an awesome sound.   We stopped for chips at the Irish Food Street stall because I’d seen someone walking around with ‘real’ fat chips and we finally tracked the chips down to this stall.  We had a bag each smothered in salt and vinegar and stood and watched Sabaton whilst we ate them.

Suddenly the Swedish owner of the stall came rushing over.  It seems he was thrilled that he’d finally sold his chips to someone from the UK and he asked our opinion on whether his chips tasted like those in the UK, apparently his Swedish customers hadn’t been too complimentary because they were used to french fries.  His chips were like those the chip shops make at home only slightly posher, they still had their skins on and he put ground crystallised sea salt on them, they were really good chips.  I told him they were the first ‘fat’ chips we’d seen since we left England (it seems throughout Europe they only sell french fries) and we thoroughly enjoyed eating them.

We went back to the van when Sabaton finished, their set had been full of pyrotechnics and they played a beautiful film of scenes from around Sweden during one of their songs, it was exciting to think we should see some of those areas on our travels through Sweden.

As they are Swedish they spoke to the audience in Swedish (unsurprisingly), up until we’d seen them we could have been at a festival in the UK because all the bands spoke English and although we couldn’t understand what Sabaton were saying it made the evening very special to hear them speaking in their mother tongue.

It was a truly memorable day.

Back at the van we sat and watched more Vikings because it was pointless trying to sleep with all the noise going on outside, yet another late night, just as you’d expect at a festival.