25th August 2016. Malmö, Lund and Höllviken, Sweden.

We cycled into Malmö in the morning.  On the way in we saw two nursery nurses sitting on bikes which had a cart attached to the front of each bike, in each of the carts were eight toddlers.  It looked like great fun for the toddlers but it must have been extremely hard work for the nursery nurses to manoeuvre the bicycles with so much weight at the front.  Unfortunately I didn’t get a photograph of them, they’d cycled off by the time I’d got across the road and turned around.

The city was lovely, it was a nice mix of old and new architecture but the new architecture complemented the old.

It looked as though a lot of thought had gone into the colour schemes of the building.  There was also a lot of art throughout the city.

We cycled round a corner and there was a bronze ‘marching band’ we noticed a gap between the band members so we assumed that was for tourists to join the band.  Darren decided to ‘play’ the trombone.

We found a town square and went into the Folk & Rock Café for fika, the cakes looked homemade.  When the waitress brought them out to us the portions were huge (my favourite type of cake) and she told us the coffee was refillable, let the band start playing “Heaven, I’m in Heaven”.   The cakes were gorgeous, we sat and ‘people watched’ while we ate them and although it came to 140 Kr (£14) it wasn’t as expensive as we’d expected considering the location of the cafe and the size of the slices of cake.

I saw another lady with a child cart on the front of her bicycle while we were sitting there, what a brilliant idea.

We were interested to see how they removed building rubble from their buildings.

We took a different route back to the van and I stopped to take photographs of the architecture and art along the way and the staggered modern bridge.

When we got back to the van I persuaded Darren to come swimming in the sea (his pet hate).  The water was very shallow for an extremely long way out, which is probably why they have a pier.  Darren decided to wade across from the beach to the first set of steps on the pier so I followed him, I wasn’t quite so keen when I had to wade through a patch of seaweed (my imagination always goes into overdrive and I imagine all sorts of things hiding in there).  The water wasn’t quite as warm as it had been the night before so it took us a little while to take the plunge.   Once I was in the water it was fine but Darren was adamant it was freezing (it wasn’t).  We weren’t able to stay at the beach for very long because we felt we might have overstayed our 4 hour parking allocation and although it didn’t seem quite so bad at night we weren’t sure how strict they were during the day especially as we were taking up four car parking spaces.  We were very lucky and didn’t get a parking ticket, I can’t ever imagine that happening at home, they pounce on you even if you’re 5 minutes over your time.

Our next stop was Lund, it took an eternity to find somewhere out of town to park.  The SAT NAV sent us to a Park and Ride, we should have known not to trust her, when we were in Bruges she sent us to one that turned out to be Park but No Ride, we ended up walking in.  This time it was a tiny car park with just enough room for ten cars so it was No Park and definitely No Ride!  We drove round and round until we found a car park which wasn’t ‘P-hus’ which we thought might be multistorey, no good for us.

After we’d parked we had lunch and watched some students playing a game where they had to throw wooden pegs and try to knock down wooden pegs that were standing upright.  The ride into town was as usual down a very long hill.  It was another baking hot day.

We followed the cycle path and used the map on Darren’s phone for part of the journey.  When we spied a park with lots of trees we turned off the main road and cycled through the shady park instead. I was quite disappointed when we reached the other side and had to go back out into the sun and cycle along cobbled streets.  There seems to have been an inordinate amount of cycling down cobbled streets on this trip, thank goodness for the springs on my new bicycle saddle!

When finally ended up in the town centre and lo and behold the whole centre of the town was an open air car park!  Oh well I suppose the exercise does us good.

We discovered why Lund seemed far busier than any of the other places we’ve visited on this trip, it’s a University town with beautiful buildings like Oxford and Cambridge and we had arrived during Rag Week!  There were students running around the town in groups, each group wearing different coloured boiler suits, they were thoroughly enjoying themselves.

We enjoyed looking around Lund but with the combination of the heat, the large amount of people, cars, buses and bikes (I was certain it was only a matter of time before I caused an accident as they appeared to be hurtling towards me from all angles) and having done the sightseeing thing already once that day we decided enough was enough and we cycled back up to the van via some pretty backstreets.

Strangely the hill wasn’t nearly as bad as we were expecting.  We did stop to take a photo of what looked like an observatory at the Science Department which killed two birds with one stone.  It gave me the opportunity to get a photograph that I’d unsuccessfully tried to take earlier out of the van window as we drove past and it also let our heart rate return to normal.

Next stop Höllviken.  We’d decided to finish our tour round Sweden at the place we began it 3 months previously, at the Viking Museum ställplats in Höllviken.  However before we drove there I wanted to follow the road as far as it went.  So we took the sea front road and got stuck in a traffic jam.  Funnily enough we’d been stuck in a traffic jam at the same point the last time we’d driven up here and as before we got bored, turned left into the town when we came to the traffic lights and carried on driving to the ställplats.

While we were here I took the opportunity of taking some photos of the dangerous roundabout that we’d accidentally tried to cycle round when we first arrived in Sweden and of the cycle path that we should have actually been following!  I’ve no doubt any motorists seeing us cycling there must have thought “stupid tourists!” and they’d have been quite right, we were both those of things!

There were already two other vans parked at the Viking Centre, they were facing front end on to the sea this time which was much better, it left space for three more vans to get a view, if indeed three more turned up.

We pulled up between them and had a lovely view of the bay to wake up to.  It was a lovely quiet night.