June 15th: Vimmerby (417.4 kms)

Feelings: Quiet, Serious.

Deep and meaningful explorations into the nature of travelling in pairs—mainly from the selfish half of the pair that has been spoiled with the luxury of solo travelling (read: not having to compromise)—accompanied packing up, writing Martin a note about his ghost’s destructive behaviour, walking back to the central station, catching the train to the airport, catching the wrongly advised bus to the car hire place and walking the rest of the way the wrong bus didn’t take us to collect our vehicle. Our Avis representative was having a deep and meaningful conversation too, under his breath, about the fact that he had to do our contract because our actual car company representative (Budget) had stepped out for a moment and arrived back at the point of the proceedings where it was quicker to go forward than back.

Our car was a little Mazda 3 (white for those who care what colour it is). It has clever things like European lights that are always on, magically dimming rear view mirrors that don’t allow the people behind you to blind you with their European lights that are always on, and even rain-detecting windscreen wipers (I’m dubious but I’m told).We strapped Wesley in to the back seat and were away. Destination: Vimmerby. Those of you who have never seen us on the balcony of 4 P— sipping Rekorderlig cider on a balmy evening and playing mega-Scrabble (the one with quadruple word scores and an endless bag of letter tiles) will be unaware of our liking of said cider. Said cider comes from Vimmerby, Sweden. We wanted to see its home, see its brother and sister flavours that never make it down under. It didn’t look far, but as you can see from the odometer reading, it was a decent distance. We finally made it. We had V—‘s first ever tent raising and headed back to town for dinner. There was an Old Town to Vimmerby but we weren’t able to find it. We ended up at a weird little restaurant-slash-pub called Chaplin’s. The Swedish to English ratio is higher here and we have to at least try to get the phrase book out and be respectful, but we were very well attended by some lovely bar staff and enjoyed a meal and a very delicious Norwegian pear cider (irony of not having Rekordelig cider available at bars in Vimmerby hangs heavy here). We also got to enjoy some Swedish karaoke. The crowds started arriving in droves at about nine pm. There were security staff that, if they were in the lifts at work, would be mistaken for SOGies (very tough looking policemen with zero percentage body-fat). There seems to be a subtle difference between Swedish and Australian karaoke though. In Australia the announcement that a male was about to come up and sing Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Hello’ would have (1) made him the laughing stock of his friends and possibly the victim of a violent expression of dislike from other patrons, and, (2) made everyone else cringe at the thought of just how bad this was going to be. In Sweden it seems that only the reasonably talented actually are given possession of the mike. I stopped trying to work out what song I was going to sing.

Zipping ourselves into the tent for the night, V— let me know that in the morning there may be a revision of the gladness, or not, that he felt towards the fact that I had chased him on my bicycle those couple of years ago. Breaths are baited.