Blogs from Kalmar County, Sweden, Europe
Day out on Scooter on island of Öland SWEDEN
Published: July 22nd 2010Europe » Sweden » Kalmar County
July 19th 2010
Today the scooter came out of its hiding place in the Tandy garage and we set off to explore Öland. The island is bigger than we had thought so we decided to tackle st the south part as that is the Unesco designated World Heritage area. It is a massive plateau of limestone with only a very thin layer of earth on top and has a very unique set of vegetation. Human beings have lived here since prehistoric times. We hadn’t gone far when we realised that we needed fuel for the scooter and there were not many buildings about never mind garages. We would have liked to go right to the bottom tip of the island to Ottenby where there is an important bird watching area as this island is a major migration point for ... read more
July 18th 2010
Glorious weather has returned - blue sky and hot sun. Made even better by the news from the UK (which has been having a drought / heat-wave), that it is now wet and chilly. We left our very nice campsite at Gamleby and headed for our last stop in Sweden on the popular holiday island of Oland off the East coast. Easy drive there through pleasant countryside and we stopped at Kalmar to admire the castle, the beautifully maintained cemetery next door and the most wonderful scented roses which filled the air with their perfume. Good to see that down here in the south of Sweden not all the wooden houses are painted the deep red of the north but are in lots of lovely colours. Especially like the bright yellow and egg-shell blue ones. From ... read more
July 17th 2010
Woke to a grey all-over sky which was quickly followed by an explosive and very wet thunder storm. After all the heat of the last few days we couldn’t quite summon up the energy to decide where to go next so stayed on this very relaxed and pleasant campsite for another day. We did expect the rain to clear up enough so we could go down to the sea pool for a swim but never quite made it. Nor did we get to explore the little nearby town of Gamleby. Very pleasant under our awning though with a view to the water and warm enough to stay in shorts all day so we just had a good read and rest day. After all the hustle and bustle of Stockholm not such a bad thing. Realised that, ... read more
July 16th 2010
Left the heat of Stockholm and headed south for a quieter spot on the coast. Stopped to shop on the way and bought what we thought was milk but turned out to be ‘curdled milk’. Yuk - does not make good coffee ! Really pretty driving in this part of the country. Everything is far softer somehow though there are still plenty of trees everywhere. We headed for Gamleby which seemed to be a reasonably small town on the coast, albeit in one of the deep coastal inlets as occur all the way down this Bothnian Sea coast. Found our Kustcamp campsite and liked it. Has a super sea water pool which is delimited by a floating pontoon. Our swim was quite delicious as we have needed a proper cool down since the heat of Stockholm ... read more
August 29th 2009
From Copenhagen, our next big stop was Stockholm. We wondered, what the swedish landscape would be like. It is beautiful. Wide land, very bright sunlight. It is flat but here and there a little rocky. Very green and clean. On our way to Stockholm, we thought we would pick two random cities in Sweden, where we could camp. The first stop turned out to be right next to a beautiful lake. We put up our tent and felt pretty cold during the night but when we woke up in the morning, we had a beautiful view on the little harbour. After a small breakfast of bread and mamas good strawberry marmelade (we stole one out of the fridge before we left ;) ), we headed towards Kalmar, our second stop. Kalmar turned out to be a ... read more
June 4th 2009
On Tuesday morning we left Monsteras to Karlskrona, where our ferry would take us to Gdynia, Poland. On the way we took last chance to visit Kalmar, relatively big city, capital of county and big university center. It has a nice old town and castle in renesance style. We had there a sensible lunch (according to Bogucha) which consisted of good pastry and coffee in one of the old town caffeterias. Then we headed for Karskrona, where we, after visiting a Marine Museum, old town and eating a very good dinner, boarded our ferry. We had a very smooth overnight trip. We had a good time in swedish style, close to nature and in a slow pace, thanks to wonderfull swedish-polish hospitality. Thank you Bogucha and Swen.... read more
June 1st 2009
Yeasterday finally the weather was good enough to take the boat trip. It was not perfect, it was still pretty windy but warm enough to enjoy it. Swen knows this area as "his own pocket", so we were save, but honestly I would be lost in this "archipelago" in no time. It is a maze of small and big islands with small and big penisulas, which all look the same.There were a lot of summer houses around, some of them on really small islands. Most of the buildings here have color, named by my Bogucha, "swedish red" and really look right for this area. Afternoon we had coffee with cake under the lilac tree and laid down on the small pier and watched goose and swans taking their little children for sunday walk. Heaven!!! Today we ... read more
May 30th 2009
Two days ago, having a really bad weather, we decided to go visit Vimmerby. Any fan of famous swedish writer Astrid Lingrens should visit her park. The park was a "swedish style", (oposite to american) not too fancy or big, but Ania, being a third generation reading Pippi, Emil and Lotta had a lot of fun. There are minatures of the houses and villages from the books, and there were several shows (in swedish) with kids favorites characters (for me it will be always Emil). Dispite swedish language we had a lot of fun watching the shows and they sang a lot of songs also. It was fan for me to watch Ania discover a lot of places, where her favorite characters had their adventures or got in trouble. As I mention weather gave us all ... read more
May 30th 2009
On Saturday was a beautifull sunny day, but it was too windy again for the boat. So the next on " must see" list was Oland, the long island along south-east coast near Kalmar. It is quite long, 160 km. but relatively narrow. Many Swedish go there camping during summer, it is popular among bird watchers, good place for long walks and bike rides. We decided to go visit only southern part of the island with famous grassy areas called Alvar Plains, where during May are they are covered by certain kind of local orchids. We were late for orchids, buy the fields were still covered with other blooming flowers. The island has been inhabited for thousands of years and we could still see many old stone structures, graves, windmills and interesting farm buildings and ... read more
May 28th 2008
.May 28, 2008 Hotel: Hotel Svanen, 680SEK ($115) Today Dean and I planned to pick up our rental car and go out to Öland Island. Öland is a long island just offshore of Kalmar in southeast Sweden. The southern portion of the island has been denoted a UNESCO World Heritage site for its wildflower meadows and Stone Age sites. It's a very popular place with vacationing Swedes during the summer. There are also several hundred old style windmills scattered around the island, down from a peak of several thousand. Öland is connected to the mainland by a 6km long bridge; one of the longest in Europe. We had a yummy breakfast at the hotel then set off walking to find the car rental place. It didn't look so long on the map but ended up being ... read more
