18th June 2016. Lindby Boden, Öland, Sweden.

We had a good night’s sleep and a lazy start to the day sitting in the front seats of the van eating breakfast and watching birds posing and two rabbits hopping around.

It’s wonderful seeing so much wildlife here.

Darren did some work, I’m still trying to catch up with the blog, the days are whizzing past and I’m still writing up things from my notebook that happened in Belgium, so I reckon I need to get a bit of a move on!

I sat typing until my bum got numb which coincidentally was the same moment we remembered that the sign at the end of the lane had said ‘Lindby Boden Butik and Loppis, Öppet 11 a.m. Lördag‘ and as it happened to be 11 a.m. on Lördag (Saturday) right now we decided to stretch our legs and go and see what a Loppis was.

The Loppis was a huge barn with second hand items to buy and while we were looking  round we found some wooden egg cups which is just what we needed having forgotten to bring egg cups.  We took them over to the Butik to pay for them and had a look round that shop too which turned up something else we needed.   I was looking for something to make covers for our cups/glasses because I was fed up with sharing our drinks with flies.  Years ago my Mum gave us some small circular crocheted covers to stop that happening (which I had initially thought were mats to stand drinking glasses on until she put me right!) but I had forgotten to bring them.  Fortuitously, as we were looking around Darren found some little black metal dishes which were the perfect size to sit in the top of a cup so we bought four of them and they have indeed been very useful.

Viveka also sold coffee and cakes from the Butik so we sat out in the sunshine with our coffee and six little cakes for a while before we decided we really needed to go back to the van to continue where we left off.  Apparently the Swedes have a name for a coffee and cake break, it’s called fika.  I LOVE fika, I hope we can do this again.

During our tour so far we’ve occasionally stayed at sites that didn’t have electric hook up and we’ve discovered that we can last ‘off grid’ for three days even with Darren working, so we thought it might be a good idea while we’re here to see whether we can last longer ‘off grid’.  We may have a problem if other vans are using the hook up when we run out so fingers crossed that they aren’t.