One thing we forgot to put about Copenhagen: In the city there was road works everywhere we turned, but this was ok as it seemed they were making a concentrated effort to improve the roads and squares which was great to see.
I want to reply to Di’s comment, each persons experience with a city is always different, I don’t think you had rose coloured glasses at all. It always depends on the weather, the people around you, the time of the year and how you are feeling. We liked Copenhagen – it is a lovely city, there were just some things we hthought were a little ordinary to us. I remember sitting in Amsterdam having our very expensive beer and looking at all the rubbish lying everywhere, but we watched guys cleaning it up. Unfortunately you cant stop people dropping their rubbish and butts everywhere but you can make an effort to clean it up every day. In the Haven in Copenhagen the rubbish, broken glass, butts etc had been there for a while which was such a shame, it wouldn’t have taken much to clean.
We drove up to Helsingor and stopped up for half an hour and had a nice coffee and cake in the small busy village. If we had had a bit more time this would have been a lovely place to spend a little more time. People were from all over I think, who were either going on the ferry or had come over on the ferry.
We drove down to the ferry and managed to get on an earlier one than we had booked. The crossing was only 20 minutes which wasn’t even enough time for Scot to have a drink! He was disappointed. They were selling lots of alcohol on the ferry I guess because it is harder to get in Sweden. In fact we haven’t even seen a place that you can buy it yet, except one supermarket but that only had low alcohol beer and cider – not quite what Scot wanted! The drink on the ferry wasn’t that expensive at all – in fact quite a bit cheaper than Australia.
Off the ferry we drove and would you believe it we turned on the radio and Abba was singing, welcoming us to Sweden. We headed up North East towards Vaxjo which was on the way to the Speedway. As I had been told there are lots and lots of spruce forests and they line the roads we travelled on. There are pretty lakes all over which seem to have most camp grounds located on them. We stopped for the night at Evedal which is just out of Vaxjo and right on a large lake. They had a great area for swimming and even had 3 diving platforms up to 10m but when you dived in you couldn’t see what was under the water so it looked quite dodgy and would have been a leap of faith that no rocks or branches were hidden. Even Scot was unsure of diving there but it was a bit cold and late when we arrived. I wish I wasn’t quite such a wuss with the cold otherwise I would have had a great swim there. The campground was like Copenhagen – not enough facilities for everyone there so we had to queue up for a shower in the morning.
We went for a walk in the morning around the lake edge and one older man was in the water having a bath in the lake with his soap – maybe he didn’t want to wait in the queue (the far queue…haha).
When we arrived at this campsite they wouldn’t let us in to start with as we couldn’t find our camping card we had bought when arriving in Denmark. We realised the buggar in Copenhagen hadn’t given us our card back when we left, so we had to pay 150sek for another one. They are expensive and you can’t camp in Scandinavia without one. They want to keep a track of you wherever you go here.
Scot was chaffing at the bit to get going as he didn’t want to miss out on the speedway. We hadn’t been able to buy tickets as it wouldn’t accept our credit card, which we found out the reason why and it was because our ip address for the computer was from a different country to our credit card. Which pretty much puts any tourist out of the picture as far as tickets go. Anyway I wanted to try to catch up on some emails as we were early and we had good free wifi for once so we left late in the morning. The road wasn’t busy as it hadn’t really been the day before, but it started to rain on the way. It didn’t just rain but it poured. We started to wonder if it would be cancelled.
When we arrived in Malilla we decided to go straight to the track and check it out for parking for the night etc. The guys on the gate wanted to charge us an extra 200sek if we weren’t going to leave the park after the race but they said we could go camp down the road. There was a huge field that was starting to get filled with hundreds of campervans, caravans and tents. So we decided we would park up there and walk down to the track when the ticket office opened.
The rain kept coming and coming and coming. The guys on the gate said the rain was due to stop at 5 so it would be all ok. We still bought our tickets knowing that if it was cancelled they weren’t going to refund anyone although they would have tried to run it the next day first. The seats we wanted had of course gone, but in the end it didn’t matter when we saw the track, there weren’t really any bad seats.
By the time we walked down as the gates were open, the driveway to the field was a muddy quagmire and the grass was soppy and mushy. The rain had stopped and the air was light misty foggy and damp, but at least not raining. There would have been about 10,000 people there, but the stadium takes about 15,000. The rain would have kept a lot away which is a shame. The alcohol being served was all light and the only food they served was hotdogs, pizza, licorice and lollies. Strange combination.
It is still the middle of summer here so I am wondering why we are wearing: long johns, two woollen singlets, T-shirts, jumpers, rain coats, scarves, boots, woollen socks and carrying gloves and hat!
The 16 world class riders were from all over, but there were 3 Aussies in there – Troy Bachelor (from Brisbane), Chris Holder and Jason Doyle. We have seen them race at north Brisbane. They did really well, Doyle and Holder were in the semi-finals but unfortunately didn’t make the final which is a shame. It was a great race and for Scot definitely worth the detour to get there, it was a tick off his bucket list and now he can’t wait for the Isle of Mann. They did take quite a while to get the track right after all the rain but they had covered it up while it was raining so it didn’t get saturated. We did cheer for the Aussie riders so did our bit to help them along and there were two other Aussie flags in the audience that we saw J. One guy yelled out Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, but by the time I realised he had done that it was too late to go Oy, Oy, Oy.
Walking back to our van at the end of the night, the walkways were muddy wet messes. I had worried that we may get stuck trying to get out in the van in the morning but we were ok.
They must have partied on till all hours at the track as we could hear the music from the van. I’m not sure how much partying can be done on light beer though?
We lost our umbrella there as we weren’t allowed to take them in but Scot scored a program left behind by someone so I guess it was even.
We got up reasonably early in the morning as I didn’t want to be the last one out in case we got stuck. The grounds were a quagmire of mud and puddles but most people were ok. I only saw people pushing one van out of a rut.
Sunday 26th July
We leave Malilla and head down the coast on our way around to Norway. We intend to travel the coast around the bottom of Sweden as it is meant to be the prettiest part of the country. We aren’t sure what we will see as we head up to Gothenburg. We travelled down to a lovely area with lots of little islands and bays and a large port called Karlskrona. On the way down the tree lined roads thinned to more fields and hills and some forests. Makes a change from nothing but forest on all sides. We feel that Sweden’s main income is probably timber – funny that. Of course Volvo is also a big industry as they are everywhere – but you can’t complain about the Volvo driver in front as they aren’t old men in hats….lol.
We are staying in a camping ground that is quite huge with lots of wild areas and water front sites as it is on a peninsula. There are a lot of kids around this campsite everywhere and as much as it’s nice to see the kids having fun, I will be glad when they go back to school in a week’s time for a little peace at night. Since it doesn’t get dark until about 11pm, they don’t go to bed very early and you can still hear them when we go to bed ourselves. Scot calls me a bar-humbug, but I think there is a time that children need to quieten down for those who like to sleep earlyish.
