22nd August 2016. Gothenburg, Sweden.
We had a quiet night, I know because I was awake for most of it waiting for someone to try to break into the van!
The message had made us nervous about the area, we didn’t like the idea of leaving the van unattended we felt that it was more likely to be broken into during the day in a quiet car park like this when local scumbags were well aware that motorhomers would be leaving their vans during the day. It’s ironic that we felt nervous in this area where it was beautifully kept and it wasn’t covered in graffiti!
We’d decided that we weren’t going to go into Gothenburg after all but we decided to make use of our electric hook up to try to make a dent in the blog which was getting further and further behind with uploading the photographs.
However our plans changed, yet again.
I’d woken up before Darren and started working on the photos to get as much done as I could. When he woke up I made coffee then we sat in our night clothes working on the blog. We were still slobbing out mid morning, although every now and again we’d talk about getting washed but still didn’t make the effort to move.
We were surprised to hear a little baby giggling in the morning as his mummy and daddy got him ready to go out in his little trailer on the back of their bikes. He’d been so quiet all night we had no idea that our neighbours even had a baby. The fact they were going to leave their van in the car park made us start to question whether it was any more dodgy here than any other car park.
We’d noticed there was a UK registered motorhome opposite us and I’d been trying to persuade Darren to go over and say hello when we eventually got washed and dressed. When noticed a man walking towards our van from that motorhome we were very pleased when he arrived at our door. He said his name was Tim and he and his wife Vicky were touring with their sons Dylan and Evan and their two dogs. Apparently Vicky had seen our tour name on the back of the van while she was walking their dogs and had Googled it and found our blog. He told us they have a blog too, lifestooshort.wordpress.com.
We were so pleased that he came over to introduce himself and we went over to their van to say hello to his family. We had a lovely time swapping anecdotes and tips (by the way Vicky when I mentioned that tip we’d read about in Motorhome Life to stop the drains from smelling by wiping plates with kitchen roll before washing them, I subsequently worried that you might think I was dropping hints. I wasn’t it was just something we’ve found really helpful).
They’re a lovely family and Dylan and Evan were great fun with their comical observations. We’ve discovered that some of us Brits have a rather juvenile sense of humour because it would appear that we’ve all been laughing at words that are funny in English. For example the shop named Willy’s, anything with the word fart in it and in our case, as you already know, the Fryken Lakes, to name but a few.
We were rather worried that we might outstay our welcome because we were enjoying chatting to them so much. We finally let them get on with their day two hours later and we went back to get washed. It’s Sod’s Law we’ve not spoken to another Brit in three months of travelling and when we FINALLY meet fellow Brits we go visiting unwashed and in our night clothes! So classy! Sorry!
We went back to the van and got lots of photos uploaded. It was well worth it just to spend the day there and see for ourselves that it was peaceful but with a regular stream of people cycling and jogging through. We also watched the campsite maintenance man in a ‘Gator’ coming and going throughout the day so the car park wasn’t deserted like we thought it would be. As a consequence we decided that we would stay another night and go into Gothenburg after all.
We also had another rather unexpected visit from a German couple who had been picking mushrooms in the woodland. They popped over to the van to see whether we had a bag they could put their mushrooms in and told us where we could pick some. As we have no idea as to what an edible mushroom looks like we decided it might be a bit daft for us to go foraging!
In the evening I was looking over towards the entrance and I noticed lots of twinkly red lights through the trees. I hadn’t noticed them the previous evening and it took me a while to realise that it was actually the sunset sparkling through the leaves. I went to take a photograph but there were so many trees I couldn’t get high enough to see it fully although some of the trees behind our van had tints of red on them.