This was a big deal for me and lifted me immensley. We had an incredible tail wind and knocked out the first part of our journey (still going up) super quickly, it was pretty cold and we had some miles to cover that day so I was glad to be on the move. We hit the out skirts of Linsköpping and hung a right, que virtual screeching of breaks, whoa whoa whoa, we were hit with an instant head wind which practically stopped us in our tracks. We turned off the main road and crawled along, hmmmmm I thought the speed this morning had been too good to last. At snails pace we wound past brown muddy fields and huge milking farms then the road ran out. There are lots of minor roads in Sweden that lead to little villages, they are normally signposted in yellow and the roads are made of mud of clay, our fairly big road had just turned in to one of these. Hmmmm had we gone wrong somewhere? I was map reading today and suddenly panicked that I had difted off into one of my daydreams and missed the turning but nope, Sylv hadn't seen one either. So we thought we may as well carry on, which we did and 6 or so km later we popped out on a road again. Volia.
We were hungry again and decided to stop for lunch, the landscape looked just like Dartmoor with lots of big grantie rocks jutting out of the ground. I thought we could recreate a childhood moment by picnic-ing atop one so pedalled on until we found a suitable spot. We had a little feast and as we prepared to leave a man came out of his house to give us a wave off. Sorry we're English and we can't speak Swedish we chorused for the 100th time. Oh he said my neighbour is English, go and say hello to Raymond. So we did.
Hello, yoo-hoo we called to Raymond who was outside in his blue boiler suit. Hello, I say, we hear your English, we are too.........Hello he said looking like he'd like to run a million miles. Ah well we'll just be on our way I thought, then his wife came rushing out of the house, are you English she said smiling. Yes, yes we are. She was called Wyn and after a short chat in the drive (by which time the next door neighbour we had originally met had joined us with his wife and her sister) we were invited in for tea and biscuits. Yippp deee dooooo. One of my favourite daydreams was that at any given moment a lovely Swedish person was going to rush out of their house and invite us in for tea and cinnamon buns (when I told Sylv this she said she too thought about it constantly), this was pretty darn close. We were going into a Swedish house, a lovely yellow one and there were going to be some Swedish people there. The chocolate digestives more than made up for the lack of cinnamon buns. Job done.
We spent a lovely hour or so talking with everyone. Wyn and Raymond were so lovely and it was great to meet them, their neighbours told us all sorts of great Swedish history and facts. We learnt that Norsköpping (the big town to the North of us) was called the Manchester of Scandinavia due to it's textile connections. Fantastic we thought.
Bidding them all a fond farewell and after lots of photos, we set off to Södersköpping to find our hostel. And what a beauty it was, real warm and cosy and we were met by one of the wardens Ola who regaled us with almost all of Sweden's history and told us a troll story.
All in all a very excellent day.
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