8th June 2016. Åhus and Tosteberga Hamn, Sweden.

It was time to leave the farm and on the way out of the yard we stopped for water but the tap was just a valve and bit of pipe, luckily Darren had read that it was a good idea to have a universal adaptor which he still had to force on to the pipe.  The German man who had just been using it pointed to the tap and said to Darren “Scheisse!” which we assume means “Shit!” because it definitely was.

He was driving a very old Frankia, which fills us full of hope that ours will be as robust, they drove slowly out of the yard in the same direction as we were going.  We caught up with them further along the road and we drove in a Frankia convoy until he turned off several (slow) miles down the road.

We drove to Åhus and did our usual trick of driving all through the town trying to find the beach.

We eventually found a little car park in the woods.

As we walked through the woods we came across a beautiful house with a tower from where they could look out over the sea.

The path came out at a very long beach with a long jetty.

A group of teenagers were excitedly playing a ball game on the beach with a teacher, they looked like they were having a great time.

The tide had gone out so we walked across the wavy sand to reach the sea.  We found some little creatures swimming around a piece of wood, they were dark brown and had lots of legs which they paddled with.   As we paddled out further we saw what looked like lots of teeny lobsters swimming around.

The teenagers finished their game and went back to their camp and peace descended.

Further along the beach path we came across a pretty fishing cabin and some fishing boats.

To top it all off as we walked through the woods back to our van I saw two red squirrels playing in the car park.  I’m glad we came here, it’s lovely.

We left the car park and drove a few minutes up the road to the Coop (a supermarket a bit like Waitrose).  Darren managed to squeeze the van into a double space and hoped no one would park next to us because manoeuvring  out of the exit was going to be tight.

The shop had a great salad bar so we mixed and matched two salad bowls, for a lazy lunch, with boiled eggs, falafel, pickles, palm hearts, black barley and salad leaves.  Darren bought a HUGE loaf of rye bread, that lasted quite a few days.

We were starving when we came out of the shop so we decided to eat and then move on, with hindsight we should have gone back to the woodland car park but we didn’t and just as we were about to leave a woman pulled up in the space next to us and we could see her husband tell her the car wasn’t forward enough so she moved the car until it was hanging over the front of the parking bay.  How to make it extra hard for a motorhomer to exit the car park in one easy lesson.

Darren foiled her however and I was most impressed with the way he managed to squeeze the van round her car and out of the exit.

We drove on to our next stop, Tosteberga Hamn, I didn’t think it could possibly be as good as our last stop but it was.

It was a tiny harbour at the end of a very long single track lane, it would have been a long way to reverse if we’d met another van coming the other way, I wonder how they manage when it gets busy during the summer.

The view across the bay was so beautiful that we decided that we needed to come back here for a couple of nights after Sweden Rock, which is where we were travelling to the following day.

It was a beautiful sunny day and it seems that Thursdays are the start of the Swedish weekend because the site soon filled up with motorhomes, even the ‘Do Not Park’ area was parked in!

We wandered over to the harbour and Darren pointed to shoals of fish swimming around the boats, the fish in the shoals got bigger and bigger as we walked to the end of the pier.

After a while Darren went back to the van to do some work and I took photos of the pair of swans with their cygnets swimming in the sea, although I’ve seen loads of swans swimming in the sea since we arrived at the Baltic Sea coast I still can’t quite believe my eyes.

In the evening a storm kicked in so we set up our ‘mezzanine’ lounge/sofa’ and snuggled up to watch Vikings.