I have a long list of non-urgent projects, some of which have been on the list for literally years. For the first time ever I feel there’s a real chance that things on the list will actually start getting done. A semi-quarantined vacation suits me just fine.

One of those projects is to repaint the garden bench/sofa. It came with the house and the paint was damaged in places already when we moved here in 2008. Finally, finally, I’m doing something about it.

First step: sanding away the old, flaking paint.

I also cleaned the “lawn” behind the house of fallen cherries. The winds we felt in Gotland have blown down a lot of berries and twigs from the cherry tree. We always lose some before the harvest, but never quite this much in one go.

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.

I’m editing my photos from Saturday, which we spent on Fårö. There are a ton of horizons in those photos and a lot of them need straightening. It’s funny how sensitive the human eye (or at least my eye) is to crooked horizons! Some are less than a quarter degree off, and that’s enough for me to notice.

We are leaving Fårösund behind and heading towards Visby again, so we can take the ferry back tomorrow.

First stop: Stenkusten, the stone coast. This place looks unreal and a bit spooky. The beach is all stones, nothing else, in even-looking layers, looking almost artificial in their arrangement. At the top, furthest from the water, is a very flat surface of sharp-edged chunks of crushed limestone, which looks as if it came out of a production line at a cement factory and was evened out by a bulldozer. Next to the flat is a steep slope towards the sea, and then a flat surface again, but here the stones have been bleached white and tumbled to rounded shapes.

Next we headed for the lakeside beach of Tingstäde Träsk. Adrian wanted a beach where the water was warm and didn’t have any waves. When we got there, we were met by signs warning us of swimmer’s itch. Well, maybe a more protected seaside beach, then? But by now it was time for lunch, and finding a veggie-friendly lunch spot was not as easy in this part of Gotland as in Visby, and when we were done with lunch the weather had turned cold and windy again.

We postponed the bathing to another day and played minigolf instead. Through mostly dumb luck I won the game – I hit several holes with shots that I had no real hope for.

A full day of Fårö.

The ferry trip, which at peak times can involve hour-long queues, went quickly. Gotland in general seems to be relatively empty of tourists right now. Today the weather is wet and windy so almost nobody wants to make a day trip to Fårö. We shared the car ferry with just 5 other cars.

Initially we had a somewhat structured plan for exploring the island, but in practice Fårö is so small that you can criss-cross it repeatedly in an hour. So we just drove wherever we felt like.

First we headed south and wandered around Ryssnäset for a bit. It was seriously windy. We found more fossils, and plenty of tiny clams.



From there we turned north to see the rauk at Gamlehamn. It’s got a large, individualized rauk icon on the map so it’s got to be impressive!

The famous one is vaguely dog-shaped one with two supports. It had many companions, and all together they made for an interesting place: the rocky coastline was broken up and varied, not like the straight and even stony beaches we’ve seen before. This place really invited to scrambling and jumping from rock to rock.




After lunch we drove east to Fårö lighthouse. Not a very interesting sight. But at the end of the road, beyond the lighthouse, there was a wonderful sandy beach, which we had all to ourselves!



The weather was still windy and the water was pretty cold. Eric and Adrian took a very quick dip and then stayed on the beach instead.

Ingrid however absolutely loved this! The cold didn’t bother her much, and the beach was made extra wonderful today by waves. Well, they weren’t large waves on any absolute scale, but for a kid who has had to make do with Mälaren and Kyrksjön and other very placid bathing spots, this was exquisite fun. She jumped the waves for a long, long time. I stayed with her for as long as I could, sharing her enjoyment. We kept looking for the spot with the best waves. Ingrid cheered every time we got one that was large enough to break into foam and was literally jumping up and down with excitement. Afterwards she said this was the highlight of the whole trip for her.


Afterwards we took the long way back towards the ferry harbour, driving past the rauk area on the north-west side of Fårö. Eric and Ingrid had had enough of rauks and rocky coasts by now so towards the end they stayed in the car while Adrian and I went out to climb and scramble among the rocks (and take photos).



Parts of the coastline here looked like something from another planet. There was water, and there were rocks in various tones of gray – and nothing else. Not even the smallest sprig of grass.

We’re leaving Visby behind and heading north and then north-east towards Fårösund, stopping whenever we feel like it.

The first stop was already at Lummelunda even though we were there only yesterday. There’s a nature trail there that’s supposed to be nice, but we didn’t the chance to walk it yesterday. After our visit to the caves it was high time for lunch, but the café there had no proper vegetarian dishes so we started cycling back towards Visby to find food. Today we were properly fed and did that walk. It was rather underwhelming and the signage was laughably unclear and out of date.

Next stop: Lickershamn, to see our first rauk – the Jungfrun. The rauk was cool, but the walk from the village to the rauk was actually even nicer. It’s mostly pine forest, which we do admittedly get a lot of near Stockholm as well, but it’s different here. The ground here is limestone instead of granite, so the undergrowth is completely different. It looks and smells like the pine forests of my childhood. (I lived in Tartu as a child but spent most summers near Tallinn, where the forests were just like this.)

Ingrid and Adrian were more interested in the WW2-era concrete bunker that was situated high on a clifftop near the rauk.


After lunch we drove all of 8 km north to the next beach, at Ireviken. (Gotland is so small that we could start driving towards our next hotel at dinnertime and still make it there before the night.)

Ireviken one was recommended by the internet as a nice bathing spot and, even more interestingly, as a great place for fossil hunting.

We spent a lot of time searching for fossils. At first when we looked at the rocks we couldn’t see anything other than pretty smooth rocks, all white and tumbled into round shapes by the sea – but mostly featureless. But when we sat down and looked more closely, there were fossils everywhere, of all kinds of shapes and sizes! There were fossils clearly shaped like seashells and snail shells, fossils that looked like corals, and loads of small round shapes.


This was definitely today’s highlight and we had a lot of fun combing through the rocks.

When we finally had enough of fossils, we had a quick swim in the sea. The water was pretty cold, but we wanted to at least take a dip so we could say we’d done it – just in case we don’t get a better chance. Swedish summer weather can be unreliable.

We’ve seen enough of Visby for now. Time for something different. We rented bikes today and cycled to Lummelunda and back.

The caves at Lummelunda were our destination in a way but the cycling there and back was almost more important. And we made several stops on the way – to admire the views, climb rocks, take a walk in a nature reserve, etc. We took a long and lovely lunch break at Krusmyntagården. Almost all our food here on Gotland has been good but this was the best meal I’ve had here.

The caves themselves were somewhat underwhelming, to be honest. The parts that the public tour visits are so tourist-adapted, with wide concrete walkways and large man-made pillars, that it barely feels like being in a cave. And the guide was some random guy, probably employed for the summer only. He delivered his talk by rote with rather fake-seeming enthusiasm, and probably knows nothing more about the cave than the words of that talk.

The cycling was very nice. Gotland is flat and bike-friendly. Much of the bike route from Visby to Lummelunda goes along a small seaside bike track with lovely views. Other parts followed small roads, although a part of the trip was along the main road as well (where cyclist had either a separate track off to one side, or at least a dedicated wide strip of road).

Even though the distance from Visby to Lummelunda is just 15 km, the outing took us the whole day: we left the bike rental at 11 and were back just before 18.

Adrian was pretty tired after the trip. He hasn’t learned to pace himself yet; he enjoys cycling fast so he does that until he runs out of energy and then instead of slowing down, or asking us to slow down, he just pedals harder. I had thought that maybe we could cycle around Fårö (which we’ll be visiting on Saturday) but that’s going to be even longer so I guess it’ll be the car then.

The only trouble with cycling is that it’s hard to take photos!

A day of walking in Visby among its rosebushes and church ruins. There are more roses than ruins in Visby, but the ruins were definitely more fun to look at and to photograph.

The first ruins we passed today didn’t look super exciting from the outside but had an invitingly open gate so why not. And while they weren’t super exciting, they were pretty nice, so we went inside the next ruins as well, and the ones after that, and then some more. And some of the later ruins turned out to be quite exciting indeed!

The churches were abandoned during the reformation, five hundred years ago, give or take. Just… deemed so worthless that they were abandoned. Not worth keeping dry, not worth tearing down. I guess there would have been beggars or vagrants living in them, maybe. And now they’re tourist sights.

Some are more broken down and overgrown with grass. Others have pillars and vaults still standing. In a few we found stairs inside the walls, and in one them a walkway high up circling most of the nave, still walkable all the way around.

I like vaults. And pillars, and towers, and walls thick enough to have stairs inside them. If I was filthy rich, I could totally imagine buying an old church to live in. I guess there might not be any available in Sweden, though. I wonder what it would cost to build a medieval-style stone church.


What I really liked about these ruins is how un-tourist-adapted they were. No handrails, no warning signs, no bars to keep you from falling (except where there were large openings where you could by accident literally walk off the edge). Wander at your own risk.

There are myriad rose bushes lining the streets in Visby old town. Hollyhocks, snapdragons and poppies also grow just about everywhere, even in pavement cracks.


By the way, Visby turned out to be quite empty of tourists. There are no hordes of Stockholmers filling the streets. This really was the best time to visit!