Episode 5

The car seems to be having tantrums. David is often poking his head under the bonnet because of some electrical fault or other. The little 'black box' that came in ever so handy last year for operating the windows with the automatic control gave up is getting a great deal of use again. With a couple of squeaks this fault or that fault will show up on his instrument panel and so we pull up and he investigates. There has been a great deal of head scratching too, no wonder the hair is getting a bit thin on top. Meanwhile I just sit in my possie and stare out the windscreen. The car seems determined to go through it full repertoire of electrical problems.

Our weather has taken a turn for the worse too. We had camped in some forest for the night. The trees had large leaf buds not yet open. Overnight it rained and in the morning all the trees had burst into leaf with some leaves being quite large. The car was covered in the little hard shells that had protected the leaf buds. It was just such a sudden burst of growth, Lyn was amazed.

We had reached Copenhagen and my humans were looking into the best way to go into the city. During the trip into the suburbs it had been tipping with rain and it continued with brief breaks now and again. After all the options were considered it was decided that we would take the train and leave the car in a park near Ishej station. That was until we went outside again to find that it was still tipping down with little indication that is was likely to ease. After a great deal of humming and haa-ing a decision was made that we would skip Copenhagen and go on to Sweden over the bridge.

The bridge, well actually a combination of a tunnel and this spectacular bridge crosses the Oresund strait between Denmark and Sweden. It is worth the €45 toll for the experience, and it is the cheapest option for reaching Sweden. Of course by the time we pulled into the rest area and tourist info at the Swedish end the sun had come out and it was hot. We drove on into Malmo where I was taken on a walk around this pleasant city.

Still dodging the occasional shower we set out first encountering the castle that really doesn’t look that much like a castle and dates from the 15th Century. It was built when this area came under Danish rule and the King would visit occasionally. Only some of the brick work is from the original structure much was added later with it became a prison.

An interesting curiosity is the old chemist shop. Dating from the late 1800’s the interior is much as it was originally built. Of course the merchandise is todays’.

Our overnight stops have been in rest areas mostly with the odd night in a forest. All so far, have been without incident, as they usually are. Last night we had high drama; well not really but it was curious. Just as my humans were preparing for bed in comes a black sedan and parks next to us (I mean there was 5 acres of car park to choose from why park next to us) hard up its rear was a police car. The occupants get out and were swiftly put into the police car then the officers spend a good while searching the car, lockrd it up and drive off with the occupants. By daylight the car had gone.

These rest areas vary a great deal. There are those in France and Belgium that often don’t have toilets, even though they are truck stops with a large number of trucks. Then in Holland we only ever found one and it was next door to a service station. In Germany they are quite frequent and good almost always with toilets. Denmark probably has the most and best, not all with amenities but still ample. Now Sweden has a few good ones and they have heated amenities, though we have found the amenities locked in more than one case. I’m sure you are all fascinated to learn that.

We drove to Kristianstad from Malmo and then headed north on a very pretty drive through forest and past numerous lakes, through a stone fruit district, trees not yet in bloom, to Jonkὂping. We passed some buildings with turf roofs too. The rain tipped down as we tried to look around the city. It got just too heavy to do anything so we gave up. I was getting somewhat wet myself and I need lots of hot sunshine to dry in.

Some of these places make it extremely difficult for tourists. One seriously wonders if they want them at all. When we got to Goteborg we easily found a place to park the car, but paying the fee was the difficult part. Parking cars in most of Europe can be an expensive exercise. In multistorey car parks you get your ticket when you drive in and pay at the machine before going to collect your car when you are ready to leave. That’s easy enough, all the machines seem to take notes and give change. In Goteborg it was just a large, flat open car park with a machine but the machine didn’t take notes, only coins and ATM cards. What a pain, we had mostly very large notes that an ATM had given us earlier in the day, or a few coins that would only have give us a few minutes. Fortunately some kind person used their card to get us 20 Krona’s worth of parking (we had a 20 krona note to give them in payment) and so we got long enough to go and see some things. Next thing we got into the tourist info office to find a great long queue of people waiting to be attended to and only two people serving. Are tourists just too much trouble or what?

The city was founded in the early 1600’s by Gustav Adolf, there is a statue of him in the main square. He employed Dutch engineers to design this city. It is built on a bed of very unstable clay so there are, even now, not many high rise buildings. Most of the city has been rebuilt several times over the centuries, fire having destroyed great sections of it. The Town hall is from 1642 but Lyn couldn’t get a photo of that, it is mostly surrounded by scaffolding and encased in white gauze. Not looking it best I fear. We did see the Opera House and some of the ships in the maritime museum. Making our way around the city we passed along many of the pedestrian malls that make up the city centre and came to a huge market hall selling mainly meat and cheese. Then it was a dash back to the car to beat both the rain and the parking inspector.

© Lynette Regan May 9th 2013