Road trip part I

When my godfather died three years ago he left all of his belongings in his will to me, my siblings and my dad - 10 people in total. Initially we had all of his antiques and art valued with the intention of selling, only to realise that we wanted to keep most of his stuff in the family. Fortunately dividing the items up and choosing who got what was remarkably easy, and in January me and my sister A, who lives in LA, went over to Stockholm to start emptying the flat and pack up the stuff that we were keeping. It was right at the time of the LA fires, and A didn’t want to bring any of it there, so she decided that she would go back to Stockholm in the summer, hire a car and drive everything down to her house in the south of France instead. She asked me to join her on a sisters’ road trip, with all the hotels and evening meals booked by her, as an early 50th birthday present for me. I can tell you now that I couldn’t have wished for a better gift! That week that we spent together gave us memories for life and for that I’m eternally grateful. A did the drive in six days, through four countries, all on her own her own, as it was too expensive to put me down on the insurance as well. The lady is a frickin’ powerhouse I tell you! She’d done most of the planning of the trip, which made a change from how it usually is when I travel with family and friends; I’m the one who does all the research and am in charge of finding where to eat, what to look at and where to sleep.

The majority of the days were taken up by driving, and then not really spending more time in each place than arriving, checking into the hotel, going out for dinner, staying overnight and heading further south the following morning. The longest of all drives was the first one, six hours, from Stockholm to Helsingborg, a city in the south of Sweden, which neither of us had been to before. There was a lovely walkway along the sea that took us to our restaurant that evening, and there were lots of people just hanging out, making the most of all the public seating, and the fine weather. Some people also photo bombed…

Pretty much all the food we had on the whole trip was really good. We had amazing sea food at Sillen & Makrillen, basically on the beach. Awful view, right?

On the way back to the hotel we walked through the older parts of town, as little granny here (me) wanted to check out the local architecture. Someone decided to photo bomb again (her).

Hello, how cute is this house? It was recently for sale, and you can have the tiniest of sneak peeks here.

We ambled along as dusk arrived, and I loved seeing the mix of it all, including this guy.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know, let’s go check it out.”

Turns out Kärnan is a verrrrrry old fortress tower from the 1300’s (although it was most recently restored in the early 1900’s). To get up there you walk up the Terrace Stairs…

… which lets you see Helsingborg from up high. That mass of land in the distance is Denmark.

Even though we were only there for about 15 hours, it was our favourite city of the whole trip - a pleasant surprise, in spite of waking up to a parking ticket in the morning 🤦🏽‍♀️