2. Off to the Continent – Scandi bound - May 2015

It’s the Dunkerque run and as we cross, an announcement comes over the tannoy.   Just ahead of us and off to port are the little boats on their annual pilgrimage, on this the 75^th anniversary, to commemorate the Dunkirk evacuation.  About 30 or so tiny boats, looking as if they would be more at home on a lake but the same type of craft that managed against all the odds to help evacuate 340,000 allied troops in 1940.  Bear in mind that the estimates were that about 50,000 troops might be saved and you can gauge the effect this had on our war effort.

First stop it’s the French supermarche to stock up on stuff, well alcohol mainly, to offset the notoriously high costs in Sweden and Norway.  A few days later we were to read that we had far more than were allowed into Norway (a non-EU country).  The allowance is something like 1 litre of spirits and a couple of litres of wine each.  We have about 20 bottles of wine, 30 of beer and 2 or 3 of spirits.  All will be fine when we convince the Norwegian border guards that there actually 12 of us in the van but with only two passports.   More of this later.

We’ve also chosen to drive through Belgium and The Netherlands on a Friday

before a public holiday at the bottleneck known as Antwerp (apparently twinned

with Dectwerp).   The Dutch obviously have a special type of bottleneck which 
runs both sides of the tunnel in our direction under what I guess might be the 
River Twerp but probably isn’t.  So we spend about two hours in queues 
eventually arriving at a site where we spend several days near a Dutch National 
Park, De Hoge veLuwe.  This is one of those big surprises because it was 
unknown to us until Tim (No.1 son) told us about it.  An amazingly rich 
Dutch/German couple started buying land around the 1900’s.  He wanted a 
hunting estate while she wanted a museum so naturally they had both.  It was 
all donated to the Dutch Government in the late 1930s.   The park now runs to 
5,400 hectares (over 13,000 acres) of woods and heath, and the museum/art 
gallery has the world’s second largest Van Gogh collection.  Helene Kroller-
Muller began buying them in the early years of the 20th century and this is 
where you’ll see VG’s famous ‘The Potato Eaters’ among many others.  The 
park has 1500 free-of-charge bikes to use on 40 km of cycle paths and to give 
another idea of what the size is, we had a 10km bike ride from the entrance of 
the park to the museum.  Not just worth a visit but worth a journey and a visit.

Denmark was skipped through and we crossed the famous Oresund bridge for a murderous 94 Euros (about £70).  It’s actually a tunnel, then a raised road and then a suspension bridge and in total about 16 km.   Only an hour before we’d had to pay about £36 for another bridge toll.   So Sweden here we are, the third largest country in Europe and fewer than 10 million people with most of them in the south.

Choosing a campsite next to the sea 50 miles or so short of Gothenburg, we have our first taste of Sweden at Varberg a pleasant sort of place, very clean and tidy and looking good bathed in sunshine with a railway station.  We decide on a trip to Gothenburg for the next day.  The country seems to be covered in bike routes well separated from the traffic and we cycle along the front for 15 minutes back to the station.  There are quite seriously hundreds of bikes at the station, many not even locked and many better than ours but ours definitely do get locked.  A very reasonably priced two returns for a 40 minute ride to a Gothenburg so we could enjoy the rain wasn’t quite what we had in mind but we wanted to see the city.   Can’t say we were very impressed but then a rainy city would have to be very special to impress.  It just seemed too modern, all 20th century with few attractions to visit.  We had a pricy lunch and an eye-wateringly expensive two coffees and two cakes in the afternoon and caught the train back to Varberg.  I handed our ticket to the inspector on the train and she pointed out that we had a single not a return.  Well I’d definitely asked for a return so I got out my wallet and asked how much I owed.  Oh, forget it she said and wandered to the next seats.  We’d saved about the price of an eye-wateringly expensive two coffees and two cakes.  

From here we head north and cover some serious distance, about the equivalent of home to the Lake District for three days running.  The land is very wet, it rains most of the time for our journey, so good for travelling and we can understand why the country is studded with lakes.  Plus once you’ve seen a million conifers, you’ve seen as many as a normal person would want to.   The towns we pass through as very reminiscent of many small towns we’ve driven through in the USA.  Not so many billboards on the way in and out but widely spaced buildings and seemingly like ghost towns.  Mind you the rain may have something to do with that.   All that driving puts us on a latitude somewhere north of the Shetlands and on the way to the Faroes.

Driving is a pleasure due to the lack of traffic and the condition of the road surface and even though we’ve covered such a distance it still doesn’t seem remote.  Few towns, little traffic and big stretches of forest but lots of farms.  The landscape seems somehow under control and I’m hoping for some wilder country further north.

Many of you will have seen Fieldfares in Britain for their winter break, usually in flocks and often with a few Redwings thrown in.  For those non-bird people, these are both in the Thrush family.   They’re quite nervous in England but we’ve seen lots of Fieldfares here which are much happier near people.  They hop up to within ten feet or so of the van and at this time of the year are much more brightly coloured in their breeding plumage.  Only one Redwing so far though.

Fortunately for us, pretty well everyone speaks very good English which is just as well because Swedish is very difficult.  Pronunciation is partly tonal like some far eastern languages, Vietnamese for instance.  So a word with a slightly different intonation means something other than you might think and that varying intonation gives spoken Swedish what’s described as a musical quality.  There are 29 letters of which 9 are vowels.  Plurals have 5 endings or none at all, depending on a mix of the gender of a word (common or neutral), whether it ends in a consonant or a vowel and the stress of the word.  Yes, a headache and I know that Norwegian and Danish also have the same roots (Old Norse, I think) and are mutually understandable.  I think we’ll stick to English for the whole trip.