5th July 2016. Journey to Stockholm, Sweden.

As usual the day didn’t start as intended, the plan was to have a quick breakfast and drive to Linköping to a ställplats at the flight museum which was over six hours away, however we had breakfast watching some rabbits hopping around (I wasn’t expecting to see that in a city) and then I had the unfortunate experience of seeing something else hopping and it definitely wasn’t cute and fluffy like the rabbit.  It was a maggot wriggling around in the sink and when I went to remove it it sprung up in the air!

I had no idea they could do that.  I couldn’t work out where it could possibly have come from until I spied another one making a break for it through the hole in the lid of the bin.  That’s when we decided that we were not to put anything other than packaging in the large bin and that the little bin needed to be emptied every day, no more maggots, eeeurk!

Anyway after I’d given the kitchen a thorough scrub down, had coffee and written some e-mails we finally set off.  We didn’t get very far because we stopped at our ‘favourite’ Coop  for supplies, we’ve somehow managed to shop there four times on our way on and off Öland.

They have a great salad bar so we bought lunch and ate it in the van (that car park seemed to be our favoured lunch spot as well, not the prettiest of places but any port in a storm when you’re hungry and you’ve just bought your lunch).

We EVENTUALLY left Kalmar at 2.30 and then read that arrivals to the ställplats had to be before 20.00!

A change of plan was needed so we drove to a ställplats at Västervik.  It was a pretty grim ställplats so we just stopped for coffee beside the sea then thought we’d head towards Norrköping where there was another motorhome dealer.

It was getting late as we left Västervik but Darren carried on driving and we made our way to a ställplats which he had found on his tablet while we were at Västervik.  It was 30 minutes drive to the ställplats off the main road and we were both very tired, we were nearly tempted to stop at one of the two camp sites we passed on the way there but nosiness encouraged us to carry on to the end of the road.

When we got there we found a tiny harbour down a very steep lane and right at the very end of the road was a small car park which was too small for the van so we started to leave, saw another car park up the hill and tried that but it was for hotel use only so poor Darren had to do a 100 point turn to get out.

We resigned ourselves to the fact we were going to have to go back to one of the campsites and started heading back along the road when I noticed a motorhome parked in the marina car park so Darren reversed yet again and somehow managed to turn down the very steep narrow lane which was at a 160º angle to the road we were on.

We ended up parked beside the water in the pretty harbour and I went off to see about paying.  The harbour master told me where the machine was to buy the ticket but I didn’t have any money on me so Darren went over to the machine and bought the ticket while I made dinner.  We were sitting eating dinner looking out at the harbour when a jolly German man came to the door and said he’d just bought a ticket for his boat but two tickets came out, one was for a motorhome and the harbour master told him it might be ours, it was!  Apparently the tickets were in two parts and Darren had only taken one.  The man laughed, crossed his wrists and held them out in front of him and said “police come take you away without ticket!” which made us all laugh.

After dinner we had a walk round the harbour in the evening sun, bought ice creams from the little shop and sat down to eat them listening to waves lapping on the rocks.