Four go on an adventure

  It is fair to say that I am struggling to maintain motivation to write these blog posts. It is not that I do not want to, it is just that the faffing about to add pictures is getting me down a bit. I have lots of pictures that I would like to share with my avid reader (you know who you are) but it is such a pain having to upload them first from my phone to drive then download to the laptop then upload again to the blog. Faff, faff, faff. So much faffing I am completely faffed out. However, I will endeavour to at least post something from time to time. So to our trip to Oslo. If you recall we had found a parking spot on a peninsula across the bay from Oslo and decided to stay there and take a ferry into Oslo for the day. Great idea. It worked out splendidly. We purchased our ferry tickets from the little shop in the ferry terminal and we were ready to go. Next morning the weather was like a typical Scottish summer day. Difficult to say how it would pan out, might be glorious sunsh...

The worst thing about taking a holiday in my job is that when you get back you have a lot of catching up to do. I have been incredibly busy this week that I have been unable to find time to keep you all (you all, ha ha I mean both of you!!) updated. Despite my work comittemnts we have manged to move from Sweden into Norway. In fact we are now at our third stop in Norway. We started at Halden which was just inside Norway. We had found a free site with only six spaces and decided, without much real optimism, to see if there were any spaces. Prices are generally pretty high for motorhome sites here. According to the good old sat nav we were about 300m away from the site when we passed a motorhome heading the other way. Sheila remarked that that guy has just vacated a space for us. What do you know when we drove round the corner there was one empty space. A welcome bit of good luck. We were blessed with lovely weather for the three night stay so that meant that we were able to keep the big...

Sheila had a great idea and I went with it because I agreed. We are in Sweden so what is Sweden famous for? Volvo. Yes well I am not buying a new one of those although it would be high on my list of cars to buy if money was not an issue. ABBA, Sweden is famous for ABBA but that is not it either. Sweden is famous for IKEA as Sheila thought it might be an idea to eat lunch in an IKEA in Sweden. I decided to look up whether there were any particularly notable IKEAs and discovered that their headquarters and IKEA museum is in Älmhult which was not too far from where we were. It was a bit of a diversion from the planned route but since we don't have any special plans we decided to go for it. We even agreed to pay to get into the museum! IKEA Museum Inside the museum So we arrived at the museum building and found a suitable spot to park the motorhome then we paid our admission fees. Now we expected to find samples from over the years and the story of IKEA etc etc. And we DID find those t...

Today we crossed the spectacular Øresund Bridge which links Denmark to Sweden. As described in yesterday's post the first 4 km is a tunnel and then the next 4 km is an artificial island. This is followed by an 8km bridge which is huge and this is in turn followed by the toll booths where we paid the also huge toll of £116.44 for the motorhome. Although it's pretty hefty the aternative would be a ferry crossing probably costing even more and there is no viable "long way round" so it's a smile and move on moment. Contrary to a previous inaccuracy, Sweden is actually our 9th country on this trip (Spain, France, England, Wales, Scotland, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden) and we decided to bypass Malmo which is Sweden's third largest city and instead head northwards towards Gothenburg with no intention of getting that far. We stopped at Halmstad a smallish city at the mouth of the river Nissan. Motorhome stop is once again right on the quayside with a nice ...

  We've heard a lot about Copenhagen in the past and were delighted to add it to out list of cities visited. We arrived on Saturday and got settled into our camper pitch. It seems to be very popular to use areas beside marinas here for camper sites. This one is no exception right by the boats. Once settled we walked the short distance to the nearby metro station and hopped on a train to the city. The trains run every 5 minutes. Our stop was the second last stop on the yellow line with the last one being the airport. It cost £6.85 for two tickets to the city. A short time later we were emerging from the station into the bright sinshine of Copenhagen. The first thing to notice was, it was busy. Rammed. There were people everywhere but all very orderly, waiting for the traffic signals to control the cars, bikes and of course the pedestrians.  We wandered around for a while taking in the sights. I suppose a 'must see' in Copenhagen is the little mermaid statue so we headed off ...

We decided, since I am on holiday for a week to make a stop between Kolding and Copenhagen (or København) as it is known here so we made it onto the island of Fyn where we find Odense, the third largest city in Denmark. I suspect that there's a pretty decent chance that you have not heard of Fyn or maybe even Odense. Both new names to me. Before we could investigate the offerings of Odense we had to find a laundrette because we were running out of garmets that passed the sniff test with confidence. We stuffed the laundry bag with the smelly stuff and headed out by bike to the local laundry. It was just like the advert on the telly as we stripped down to our smalls and chucked everything into the machines! We popped upstairs to the supermarket and bought a snack then waited for the machines to work their magic. Soon the job was done, the clothes were clean and smelling great and it was back on the bikes to get the stuff back to the motorhome. Now it turns out that Odense is the birt...

  As reported in my last post we made our way to Flensburg in Germany. Flensburg is one of the most northerly towns in Germany and has quite pretty town centre. The weather during our three days here was not quite so pretty. On the bright side however we were in a free stopover so we were not paying to watch the rain fall. The site was adjacent to a huge shopping mall but as luck would have it everything was shut on Whit Monday. Sadly Sheila had developed a pretty bad toothache and everything was shut. We identified a few target dentists to visit on the Tuesday morning. I noticed that the big mall had a health centre in it so I made some investigations to discover that there was a dental facility there. First thing Tuesday morning we were in there offering our best German asking if they had any emergency appointments. The staff were delightful and as a bonus all spoke good English so we left a few minutes later with an appoinment for 4:45pm same day. I was working by that time so S...

  Germany is definitely one of my favourite European countries and I would love to spend much more time here. On this trip however it might be very limited. After only one night in Bremen we were forced to move again because the campsites in the area were all fully booked for the holiday weekend. We also moved a little further than planned and ended up in Rendsburg. Rendsburg is a town on the banks of the Kiel Canal which traverses this narrow section of North Germany from the Baltic Sea to the North Sea. The canal is pretty wide and must also be pretty deep because these are ocean going ships that pass through the canal. It was a busy three days of work for me and sadly the rain fell for significant proportions of the time. We managed a walk into Rendsburg on one of the days but the rest was spent watching the big boats passing by. I was able to follow them online and find out where they were coming from and going to and predict the arrival of the next boat. The guy in the camper ...

  In golf they say that Saturday is "moving day" but for us it is unsually Thursday. Thursday is one of my two days off in a week so we usually like to move to a new location and check out the sights. Before leaving Groningen we had a walk last night alongside the canal. I mentioned in a previous post that they still do ship building here so I thought I would add a couple of pictures to demostrate that. The Molvik and the Jorvik registered in Limassol Cyprus look soon to be ready for launch. They slide sideways into the canal. Would like to be there to see that. So today we were up, up and away and moved eastwards until we crossed the border and added our seventh country to the list. We are now in Germany just outside the city of Bremen. We both learned German at school but after trying to master Spanish for the last few years all that comes out when trying to form a German sentence is a mixture of German and Spanish. Maybe Gernish or Spanman is actually a language in the mak...