The weather has finally gone from muddy to crisp so we went out geocaching again. Eric and I could and do walk for hours without any extra activities, but for Adrian geocaching makes all the difference. A boring walk turns into a game. This time we went to Järvafältet, near Akalla, and picked up eight caches there.

This part of Järvafältet is quite fun to walk around in, because it’s so scruffy and varied, but still easily walkable. There are paths everywhere, but the paths go up hills and over rocks and in between deadfalls and marshes and ditches. You have to be alert and look where you put your feet. It was a good thing the ground was frozen today – one of the caches was in the middle of a marshy area that would have been really muddy otherwise.

Adrian took care of navigation today, with only a minimum of help. He’s been learning map reading both at school (where they’ve done some basic orienteering in gym class) and with his scout group, so now he actually knows what he’s doing.

With a GPS it’s mostly enough to look at the blue track line and make sure the dark blue triangle moves towards the cache rather than away, which doesn’t take much in the way of map reading skills. But he could also use the GPS map to figure out whether we should turn left or right on the next track we hit, so he can clearly relate the map to reality. When I pointed out some contour lines on the map for him, he took a look around and concluded that the cache would be at the top of the hill.

It was good for all of us to get out of the house, but Adrian seemed to need it most. His friend M has been away during most of Christmas break so he’s been sitting around the house more than usual and really needed to move and run around for a while.

Had I been here on my own I would have stopped to take photos of the pretty patterns in the ice, but today was not a photo outing.

The usual pattern repeats itself. After a week of hanging around at home and eating too much, we’re restless, so we go out walking. Eric and Adrian went geocaching in Ursvik for a few hours. It was all muddy and slippery and started raining towards the end of our walk, but it still felt pretty good.

We may not get a proper Christmas celebration this year but we can at least enjoy making lussebullar.

The one thing Ingrid wished for her birthday and Christmas was a proper gaming computer. She has a laptop but it’s starting to show its age, and it’s just not enough for the games she plays these days.

She’s spent weeks on research, comparing different graphics cards and processors and other components. Now finally she’s made her choice and put in the order. The delivery arrived a few days ago. Ingrid made a brave attempt at putting it together on her own, but then had to ask for more expert help. Eric and Ingrid spent all of yesterday evening figuring it all out. After a good while they realized that some of cables that were already attached when the case arrived, had been attached incorrectly. That didn’t exactly help.

Finally around midnight I heard them exclaiming happily that all the fans were spinning and all the lights were lighting up and synchronized with each other. Yay!

The school term has started and so has the scouting season. Today we had a meeting/workshop for the leaders and functionaries. In a normal year this meeting would have taken place in the scout group’s own building. Now with the coronavirus, we were outdoors on the meadows near Gåseborg. Slightly less convenient perhaps, but much more pleasant and energizing. Fresh air and greenery and standing meetings instead of rows of wooden chairs – and lunch in the sun with views over Mälaren.

Last time we went out walking, it was Adrian who suggested that we should go out. Except his suggestion was not that we should go walking – he wanted to go out and grill sausages, and maybe do a bit of geocaching as well. I somehow lost the grilling part completely as I was planning the outing. While we had a nice walk, Adrian did not get what he had suggested, at all.

Today we rectified that. We went out again and this time we totally did grill sausages.

What we originally had planned for today (and tomorrow and Tuesday) was a trip to Tiveden for some walking and canoeing. The weather report promised rain for all three days, so we cancelled those plans. Plan B was to go canoeing somewhere near Stockholm. But all the canoe rental places we called were fully booked by covid-cationing Stockholmers, so we were forced to cancel this plan as well. Walking near Stockholm fortunately requires no bookings and no advance planning so that’s what we fell back on.

Gålö is a place I’ve read about but not walked before. I’ve been there twice for nature photo mornings (once, twice). At those events we generally move within a very small area, so I didn’t really feel that I’d seen Gålö. And because we always drive there in the dark, following someone else’s car, I don’t even know exactly where I’ve been.

Today we walked the Havtornsuddslingan, which is a 4.5 km circular walk along the coastline of a narrow peninsula at the easternmost end of Gålö.

The path sometimes hugged the waterline, sometimes went through pine and blueberry forest and sometimes hovered between the two. The northern coast, which we walked first, on the way out, was steeper and the path was generally high up on cliffs. We had lots of lovely views there of the sea and small islands and sailing boats, which I somehow missed to photograph.

On the southern side, on our way back, there were more pebbly-rocky beaches instead of cliffs, and the path was even closer to the sea. The wind was from the south, so the sea was rougher and noisier on this side. Adrian and I tried bathing on one of the beaches but the sea bottom was so rocky and uneven and slippery that we kept stumbling all the time, so we turned back before we made it into deep water.

The actual sausage grilling we did on a new grill I bought just last week. We’ve been buying disposable grills for these kinds of outings, but the wastefulness of this has come to grate more and more on me, until I just couldn’t any more. Now I bought this portable, collapsible pop-up grill which I read about on some website some years ago.

It was all sold out in Sweden because of manufacturing issues due to the coronavirus, but I found one in a Danish web shop. I promise to use it lots and lots to make up for the wastefulness of shipping it from abroad. Although it was probably made in China so the trip to Denmark was most likely only a very small detour for it.

The grill worked really well. It was super easy to assemble and use. And the sausages came out really good! The grid on the disposable things sits right on top of the coals, so the food always comes out somewhat burned. It’s sort of an expected part of the grilling experience by now.

The grid on the pop-up grill is much higher up, so today the sausages were not the least bit burned, which might be a first for us. In fact we had the opposite problem – it was hard to get the heat up. Eric ended up blowing on the coals a lot to get them to burn hotter.

Our favourite vegetarian sausages come from Anamma.

One of the smaller cousins has a birthday party this Saturday. Adrian and Eric looked through our old Lego sets to see if there were any that Adrian could consider giving away. There were a few, but most of them he was still quite attached to, even though he hasn’t used any for some years now.

Which is fine! It’s OK to keep things just because you want to keep them. I am still peeved that some of my old things got thrown out without me having any say about it. I would have loved to keep my old school uniforms, for example.

Who knows, maybe Legos will still be a thing when Adrian and Ingrid have kids, and Adrian might bring these out from the basement and they’ll build them up together, with Adrian full of nostalgia. After all, I played with Legos when I was a child, so they’ve been around for a while. Back then we only had rectangular pieces of various sizes, some flat plates, and roofs and windows – none of the fancy models or fancy pieces that they make today existed. Today’s kids mostly find the old plain pieces boring, so my grandchildren will probably think the same of today’s models. I wonder what kind of Legos they might play with. Voice-activated? Self-propelling? AI-controlled? Hologram-projecting?

We went out geocaching/walking/picnicking. I tried to think of someplace new, and came up with Erstavik. I passed through there on my bike some years ago and walked there once on my own and really liked what I saw.


We started off with a geocache just a few hundred metres from the parking lot, and then headed towards the next nearest one, which sounded intriguing. (Floating islands!) Adrian took care of most of the navigation, with some expert help from Ingrid.

The cache description said lake Dammsjön has three floating islands. We only spotted one, and another clump of earth that could maybe have been one. It looked like a perfectly ordinary small island, with some shrubs and a few pines, and didn’t seem to be floating anywhere.

After getting the second cache, we had our picnic on a small rocky peninsula extending into the lake. (Cold falafel in flatbread, with a chutney and sour cream sauce.) It was a lovely spot and I’m glad nobody else had gotten there before us! There’s something about being surrounded by water that makes it feel like you’re really on your own.

There were flat shelves of rock leading from the peninsula into the water that really invited to bathing. The lake water felt quite warm, so we took a quick dip.

I decided to swim to that island to see whether it really floated. It did indeed! The edge of it had no support, just water below it, and it wobbled up and down when I pushed it. I didn’t try to get onto the island – it seemed like it would be tricky – but I’m curious what it would feel like to walk on it.

Afterwards I read that the islands float around so much that they sometimes reattach themselves to the shore and then depending on the weather maybe float free again. So perhaps that’s what the other islands have done this year as well. Or maybe they just floated into some corner of the lake where we couldn’t see them.


There were masses and masses of blueberries everywhere. The first ones we looked at weren’t quite ripe yet, but when we got to sunnier spots, it turned out that most of them were just ripe enough. They’ll probably be sweeter in a week or so, but we’re here now.

As we were heading back towards the car, we saw signs next to the path about a café at the beach of Erstavik. Ice cream sounded good, so we turned that way instead. After much walking, we found the café to be closed. But the beach wasn’t, so Ingrid and Adrian had another swim. Especially Adrian didn’t like the lake – it had steep, rocky sides, and he prefers smooth beaches where he can reach the bottom.

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.