The Gotland trip is over and we’re home again.

I like travelling. I like being at home again (sleeping in my own bed!). But I don’t like coming home from a trip. The end of a trip always puts me out of sorts. Somehow the transition makes me feel out of balance and disoriented. I feel irritable and down.

A night’s sleep generally cures me. And sleeping in my own bed feels so nice after a week on bad mattresses. We stayed in hostels this time; the one in Visby really had pretty crappy beds. It was nice otherwise, though, and very centrally located.

When I’m booking a package holiday, like the one on Mallorca last year, the cost of the hotels is all mixed up with other costs and becomes almost invisible. Now that I was booking three nights here and two nights there, the cost of each night became very tangible. Do I really want to pay two thousand SEK extra per night for a fancier place? Not really.

We economized a bit on the living arrangements, but not on meals. It’s a vacation; I don’t want to spend my evenings in the kitchen. And we found some really nice restaurants! Some of my favourites were:

• Krusmyntagården north of Visby. The vegetarian option (lentils with oven-baked cauliflower) was an actual vegetarian dish, rather than something where the chef has tried to replace the meat. Juicy and full of flavour.
• Magasinet in Fårösund. Looks like nothing on the outside and doesn’t have a web site (only a Facebook page) but serves great fish dishes and Thai food, with an real live Thai chef in the kitchen I believe.
• Mille Lire and Isola Bella, two Italian pizzerias in Visby.
• Last but definitely not least, Cafe Amalia in Visby. They don’t seem to have a Facebook page even. It’s a small cafe in the middle of Visby that serves breakfast all day. Porridge, overnight oats, omelettes, sandwiches, all vegetarian, hand made and utterly delicious. (Overnight oats with rhubarb compote and golden roasted coconut chips; toast with nut butter and sliced banana; sandwiches on moist sourdough bread.) The prices are steep; our breakfasts here cost as much a normal lunch. But so good!

Also, the best ice cream we had was at Visby Glass. This place is worth a detour! Glassmagasinet near the harbour is the most visible ice cream place and boasts that they serve hundreds of flavours, but the ice cream they have is mostly the standard, mass-produced stuff. Visby Glass on the other hand makes their own ice cream and the difference is huge. They had lots of interesting flavours – apple sorbet, dark chocolate, pomegranate sorbet, and so on – and I wish we could have tried more of them.