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 It was rather underwhelming and the signage was laughably unclear and out of date.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!

Because of the coronavirus situation, our annual Estonia trip and our equally-annual hiking trip both get added to the long list of “things we were looking forward to but had to cancel”.

Non-essential travel in Sweden is now allowed, though, and I’ve been vacillating about whether and where and how we should travel.

On the one hand, we don’t need to travel. But on the other hand, if we’re careful and avoid crowds and travel by car and don’t go too far (so we can get home if anyone falls ill despite everything) then it should be OK.

On the one hand, this might be the best time ever to travel to e.g. Gotland. No crowds, hopefully, which would be really nice. (Adrian’s and my trip to the empty Old Town in Stockholm was my best time there, ever.) And the hospitality industry could do with some support or the whole bunch will go bankrupt. But on the other hand, what if everyone thinks like that, and we’ll be one of a gazillion annoying Stockholmers there?

We took the chance, in the end, and here we are on Gotland. We arrived in mid-afternoon and spent the rest of the day simply walking around the town, following the city wall.

The wall is pretty amazing. It’s worn and dilapidated and none of the towers are standing (unlike some of the medieval towers in Tallinn for example). But the wall itself is still standing along its entire length, and you can follow it all the way around the centre of Visby, which is pretty darn impressive.

I am surprised at how much vegetation I see growing on the wall everywhere. It looks pretty, but roots generally tend to weaken walls, so I would have expected it all to be cleaned away.

Adrian has rediscovered Pokemon Go – I think it’s because some of his friends are playing. I quit a while ago (a year? one and a half?) and don’t intend to pick it up again; it turned out to be one of those things that I have difficulty doing in moderation so it was easier to just quit. Eric still plays some, too. Adrian doesn’t care enough to go out specifically for Pokemons on his own, but the game is enough to make him come with me when I go grocery shopping in the afternoon.

A mostly unorganized list of Adrian’s current favourites based on my interview with him.

• Book: Kalle Anka, both Pockets and the thin magazines
• Good night stories: Supilinna salaselts with me, His Dark Materials with Eric (although in Swedish and not English)
• Music: no absolute favourite, though he does like Queen, especially after we watched Bohemian Rhapsody
• Movies: Shaun the Sheep, and The Lord of the Rings
• Movie character: Legolas, because no matter what he does, he does it in a cool way
• TV series: Mandalorian, His Dark Materials
• YouTuber: CaptainSauce
• Video games: Subnautica. Blazing Beaks together with Eric. Horizon Zero Dawn he enjoys but paused because he arrived at a boss that looks hard to beat. Mostly he likes trying out new games and then loses interest after a week or two.
• Board games: Catan, Small World, Bondespelet
• Food to cook: making pasta
• Food to eat: pasta with a pea sauce; spring rolls and dumplings.
• Drink: Innocent’s apple and raspberry juice
• Fruit: raspberries, strawberries and paraguayo peaches
• Sweet: chocolate, mud cake and brownies
• Ice cream flavour: Adrian hasn’t eaten enough ice cream yet this year to have a favourite
• Friends: Elvira and Hanna. The best thing to do together with them is “just hanging out”.
• Subject at school: art, and woodworking. He likes building random things without instructions, and enjoys the wide range of materials and tools available at school.
• Activity at after-school care: building Legos, playing in the sandbox, drawing, and Ubongo, and “me and Elvira chase Silas”.
• Clothes: oversized t-shirts, soft socks with food patterns, and fluffy fleeces. He also loves the banana t-shirt we recently bought, and misses the cinnamon bun t-shirts he had as a baby.
• Body part: his big toes, “because they are big”
• Color: green
• Job when grown up: none. Adrian would instead like to be a pig when he grows up – one of those mini pigs who are kept as pets and don’t get eaten.
• Superpower: take out things from pictures and movies and make them real; and to be stretchy, because “I can’t reach and I don’t have the energy to walk”
• Season: summer, autumn, winter, spring
• Place in the house: sofas
• Animal: koalas and narwhals, like last year
• Coolest things, if only they existed: aliens with cool gadgets and zappers och UFOs and universal translators
• Thing he wishes we could do this summer: visit Estonia and go to Otepää adventure park
• Looking forward to in 4th grade: “the club” (which is the bigger kid version of after-school care) and meeting Kristian, his favourite after-school teacher
• Shoe size: 36
• Clothes size: 140

Here is last year’s list.

We played Cluedo.

The first round went quickly so we played a second round. In this round, all of us realized at about the same time that something was wrong. Just as Ingrid was saying “hm, that doesn’t add up” and Eric commented that he must have made a mistake in his note-taking, I was realizing that my notes didn’t allow for anyone to be the murderer. Somehow we had put two place cards and one murder weapon in the envelope (instead of one place, one murderer and one weapon).

Yesterday was really hot. The wooden deck gets so hot in the sun that it hurts my soles.

Cleaning the basement is an excellent activity for overly hot days! Our basement is pleasantly cool even on the hottest days – and it really needs some cleaning. Stuff just magically accumulates until it fills all available space.

Eric and I sorted through some of that stuff yesterday, throwing out all kinds of unused junk and organizing the things that we kept.

Among other things we rediscovered this pair of wooden stilts that haven’t been used for some years. They’re much more use out in the garden than in a corner of the basement.

Official Midsummer celebrations with maypoles and music such are not happening this year due to covid-19. We usually have a Midsummer picnic somewhere. And we don’t need an official celebration for that!

Most Swedes celebrate on Midsummer’s Eve. I didn’t have time to plan or prepare anything for yesterday, so we had our picnic today instead, at Hammarskog. Normally there would be a folk band and a maypole and dancing around it, but Hammarskog is a nice picnic spot without all that as well. There’s a wide open lawn sloping towards a view of a lake, and trees all around.


We had a nice and leisurely picnic lunch with silltårta and devilled eggs, and a strawberry and elderflower cake.

The cake was almost the same one as last year, because it was so delicious. (Here’s the recipe, possibly behind a paywall.) This year we transformed it into a Swiss roll, though, because Swiss rolls are more fun than cake-shaped cakes, and easier to transport. The marinated strawberry filling went inside the roll, and we spooned the elderflower curd on top of each slice, and then piled strawberries on top.

After lunch hung around for a while and didn’t quite feel like going home yet. Then we decided to play games. Apparently that’s a tradition at Midsummer parties, which I wasn’t aware of. Now I know. Femkamp, meaning a contest in five different “events”, is the most traditional form. We had no plans and no equipment with us, so we improvised with what we had and tried to find events that can be done more or less equally by all ages, even when wearing a somewhat impractical dress.

• Frisbee throwing with a lunch box lid
• Kast med liten sko, i.e. shoe throwing
• Pin the tail on the donkey (with a few post-its to mark the donkey on the lawn)
• Strawberry-and-spoon race
• Counting to two minutes (with your eyes closed)

Ingrid won every single one of them. But we all had fun, even though the thistles in the lawn bothered Adrian’s bare toes. Even my mum, who can be a bit stiff and “proper” sometimes, went all in!

The lunch box lid made a surprisingly good frisbee. It flew quite well, and even curved the same way a normal frisbee does.

Many of our neighbours apparently partied in their houses instead: there were a lot of noisy parties going on yesterday. People were getting drunk at 6 pm already, and continuing well into the night, some getting rather rowdy.

The magenta playhouse has done its job. Ingrid and Adrian have outgrown it and some parts are starting to rot.

I notice that I haven’t mentioned it much here on the blog, but here’s the playhouse being painted and here is Adrian serving me coffee and cake in the playhouse.

It’s not exactly in the way where it stands, but kind of, still. I’m thinking of maybe using that spot for a plum tree instead. A plum tree has been on my wish list for years; this summer I’m determined to plant one.

As a first step in making the plum tree happen, today we pushed down the playhouse and took it to pieces, with crowbar and saw.



Look at the difference between the north and south sides of the roof! The north face is covered with mosses and lichens, while the south side is completely clean.

School’s out and after-school care has a day off, so we were all at home today. Work didn’t get quite as much attention as it usually does.

I did my lunchtime workout as I try to do on most days, and I jumped rope as a warm-up exercise. Adrian was bored and got curious and gave it a try as well. He found it harder than it looked. I don’t think he quite understood that it’s not enough to just turn the rope and jump occasionally: that the timing is quite essential. And – just like Ingrid when she first learned to jump a rope – he puts an awful lot of unnecessary energy into the jumping. As if jumping higher and harder would compensate for the lack of coordination.

He got better and better, but never managed more than two jumps in a row.