Journey: Aboda Klint – Kalmar Castle – Öland (various sites) – Lake Tiken
Mabel and I love our morning snuggles and it’s always hard getting us out of bed and on the go, but once achieved we were raring to go on our morning walk in the forests at Aboda Klint. There are two routes 2.5 or 4.6km and when the paths separated we let Jasper choose as he was leading. He obviously has a sixth sense for this sort of thing as always chooses the longest route.
It was an easy walk up and around the huge lake. Mabel definitely caught the scent of something in the woods but we couldn’t see anything. We are on day 7 of moose watch but no sightings, still plenty of deer, cows and horses – we are great at spotting them 😂
Despite the big shop yesterday we had forgotten bread and I’ve been meaning to buy scales as paranoid all my cake munching is taking affect so when we saw a huge blue building with bright yellow writing…it seemed rude not to visit. Typically we pulled a miracle and walked around the entirety of IKEA only to find they didn’t sell scales and thus left empty-handed. We then had to brave a second huge shop which did and while Mark hunted for bread I spent 40minutes trying to fathom them out as they are Bluetooth and somehow connect to my phone to tell me stuff…why is everything so complicated 🙈 Turns out I’m a small poo’s difference from when we were in Amsterdam so I needn’t have worried.
We then drove on to Kalmar Castle and had a walk around the grounds before heading across the bridge to Öland. This island had so much history and the entire south section is classed as a world heritage site. After a quick look at a bulging tree where the mozzies tried to eat us alive, we went on a history trail. We were stopping every 20minutes or so to see numerous burial mounds and standing stones such as Mysinge Hog and the Gettlinge Grave Field. We also visited Eketorp Fort which is a reconstruction of the fort which had been in use between 1000-1400AD. Our attempts at toss the horse shoe were rediculous; we definitely need practise 🤣
Our final stop on the island was Ismantorp Fortress, it’s hard to show the scale of it in our photos, I guess you would need an aerial drone view, but it’s amazing the outlines of this fortress and you can see the chambers within…now embedded within a meadow of wild flowers.
Conscious we still have much to see and need to be back in Denmark by Tuesday for the acro festival with Heike – I can’t wait! I plumped for driving another two hours towards another flagged want to go site. Mark is generally happy just sitting and keeping watch for moose, he rarely asks where we are going but after 40 minutes he suddenly got the paper map book out and asked why we were driving West instead of South (we were driving into the sun…no fooling him!).
He had mentioned a few days ago a forest where people had abandoned their cars when Sweden changed from right to left hand drive… I’d thought it sounded cool and thinking he must be interested to have mentioned it, I was happy to drive the 2hrs 20mins to go visit it…he thinks I’m mad. We will find out tomorrow if it’s worth it as we are only 23 minutes away and currently camped overlooking Lake Tiken
SofaWolves 