12th June 2016. Back to Tosteberga, Sweden.

This morning we awoke to the strains of ‘Cum on Feel The Noize’, that was a nice blast from the past.

We had another late start.  We decided to wait for a lot of the vans to leave before we set off.

It was much easier leaving than when we arrived, no tents/people/cars to negotiate!  There were no hold-ups until we got to the main road where the police had coned off one lane so they could do random breath checks.  The big America car in front of us (there are a lot of them over here, apparently they’re very popular in Norway too)  was waved over and then so were we.   The policeman who stopped us was nice and smiley, he asked Darren to breathe into the Breathalyzer which was negative of course and sent us on our way.  That was an unexpected start to our day.

We’ve now experienced  being pulled over in two countries, Sweden and South Africa and both times the policemen were very friendly, the only difference was that the S.A. police were carrying sub machine guns and they spent quite a while teaching us how to say various words in Zulu before THEY sent us on our way!

We drove into Sölvesborg briefly to find a cash point, it looked like a pretty town but we were too tired to appreciate it.

We carried on to Tosteberga Hamn, again we drove up the single track lane without meeting any other vehicles until we were near the harbour when a big motorhome came the other way.  Luckily they found a driveway to tuck themselves in so we could go past or there would have been a bit of reversing to do.

Darren’s first job when we arrived at Tosteberga was emptying and refilling the van, while I sorted out the inside.

There was absolutely no one at the harbour when we arrived so we had our choice of places to park, whoopee!  We parked 4 foot from the sea, looking out over the bay.  It was great being able to watch sea birds seemingly swim past the front of the van!   It was a lovely sunny day so we went for a walk over to the wetlands where there were loads of sea birds.

There were two arctic terns nesting on a rock not far from the shore and every so often one of them would suddenly fly up squealing at any other bird who got too close. We sat and watched them for ages.

There were also some very strange looking birds, the males had white heads and their eyes must have been covered by feathers because they didn’t look like they had any, it looked creepy.

I must find out what breed they are……..I’ve Googled it, he’s a Common Eider duck.

We wandered round to the beach for a paddle, the water is very warm because it is so shallow.  We didn’t do that for very long because there was a family of swans swimming around in the bay and the male decided we were a threat and started flapping his wings and making his way towards us, I took that as a sign that it was time to return to the van!

Darren needed to work over the next couple of days so I planned to spend some time photographing the birds, the next day however my plans were thwarted!  A HUGE storm blew up in the night and it continued to batter the vans for the next two days, luckily it didn’t have much effect on the sea (the waves weren’t huge) or we might have been washed away but the van rocked backwards and forwards in the wind and looking at the water in front of us it seemed like we were on a boat!

As Darren was working for those two days the rain wasn’t a problem at all, it would have been rotten if it had been sunny while we were stuck in the van.  As I’m trying to get the Blog up and running I had lots to do as well.  It also gave us a couple of good TV evenings where we didn’t have to worry about disturbing the neighbours with any noise from the TV (there were now six other vans at the harbour, most of them were more sensible than us, they parked away from the water round by the ablutions building).