Category: Pictures

Shopping!

Going shopping hungry..

Found (= cycled past) a supermarket (ICA) here in Borrby and remembered that I REALLY need a toothbrush – there’s a limit to what chewing gum can achieve – so stopped and parked the bike.

There’s the obligatory bottle of hand disinfectant dispenser inside the door, but no compulsory masks or trolleys.

So. Toothbrushes

I aimed for this sort because they come with a case for the bristley bit..

Then I noticed they all have different pictures on the handles 😲🤭

Crazy.

Of course I had to look at them all…

Mine 🙂

The bluetit brush had a tiny head.. The one with bees was nice but I’d have had to dig quite a long way back. And the robin’s good too 🙂

Assorted other pictures

Jag äter en fisk! 🤯

..I’m having fish for lunch! (lit. “I’m eating a fish”)

I’m at the restaurant at the end of the World southernmost point of Sweden and they’re selling the kind of fish they only sell in this season (do fish have seasons??) and I didn’t buy ice cream, so it seemed like a good idea.

I have no idea what the menu says:

Actually, that’s a lie. I have gathered quite a lot of words and I’m pretty good at guessing. I can read things like ‘drinks’ and ‘sandwiches’ and ‘children’s menu’ and ‘hot meals’ and ‘baguette’ and ‘hamburger’ and ‘with chips’ or ‘with bread’. I can even read ‘smoked’ and ‘salmon’ and guess at ‘mackerel’ and ‘potatoes’ and ‘salad’. What I can’t read so well are the other kinds of fish or what’s been done to them. And I don’t know enough things to know if I like them even if I could read it. And what kind of sauce is sauce??

And I didn’t fancy the sound of ‘3 kinds of salmon’ or the look of some of the things people were eating.

But.

There was something that some people were eating that looked pretty good, so I went and asked for it in my best restaurant English 😉

“This one? Like fish&chips?” She smiled.

“Yup, please?” I smiled back.

Job done. I took the tray she handed me and found a table to sit at.

(Hah! As if life’s that easy. 😅

First the fork slid off the tray as I reached for my bike. Then everything else fell off as I bent down for the fork. Then the bike threatened to fall over. Arg. I gave up on the bike, took the computer off the front and went to the nearest table with space for the bike and sat down. Then I got back up and collected the bike, manoeuvring it slowly into position.)

Anyway.

The timer bleeps when your food’s ready to collect

Look at this!

Easily my best fish ever. And the batter! Ein Traum 🙂

Perfection. And no bones. 🙂

There was a steady stream of people buying lunch,

eating lunch,

Socially distanced eating..

and clearing up after lunch,

A bin each for food, paper plates, drinks cans, some things I’ve forgotten and a rack for bottles as well as a space for trays.

No masks, no contact data, no officious people. Just happy well-fed people.

Admittedly it’s summer and it’s outdoors and warm and sunny, and granted, I haven’t eaten out much in a while, still feels good though.

And the fish was great 🙂

Checking out late (and chocolate)

In the middle of packing up my stuff I looked at the time and realised I had 5 minutes to check out.

And until the loo card would stop working.

I dropped everything, picked up my purse and the Super Important Things and went to the loo.

Luckily the reception is right next door to the loo block.

I arrived with possibly half a minute to spare if you were being generous.

After I’d paid for the night, the lady did something with the card, “you have 3 showers left, do you want a chocolate?”

Took me a while and a bit of questioning to figure out she was serious.*

Um?

Do I want chocolate?

Is that a question?

Yes..

Yes I do.

So I took one 🙂

1 bar of chocolate? That’ll be 3 showers please..

The end.

Almost. I still have to pack the tent and actually leave.

* as opposed to certain people who ask if I want cookies when I feel I’ve done good things..

…and they all handed their passports over and 3 fell out..

Having got through the Danish checks I assumed they wouldn’t check again in Sweden.

I was wrong.

The Swedish border controllers were stricter than the Danish, although they didn’t make us take our luggage out of the bus which was nice of them.

After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, and a lot of hi vis people getting on and off the bus inspecting things and talking into their walkietalkies and/or phones, three people were told to get off the bus for unknown (to me) reasons.

I overheard one lady asking why she couldn’t continue on to Malmö, only to get this reply:

“I ask the questions here.”

And that was that. End of conversation.

They were eventually (~40 minutes later) taken to one of the rooms in the building on the right and the bus was allowed to finish the journey in peace.

Leaving

I would like to tell you how I was packed and ready to go in almost no time and how I got a full 8 hour sleep in before getting up refreshed and leaving on time with 2 neatly packed baskets.

But that’d be lying.

I wasn’t at all ready for anything and I didn’t sleep and apart from the baskets I also had a backpack and a shopping bag for extra stuff I couldn’t fit in the baskets but didn’t want to leave behind.

But.

Against that, I did pack and change the water in the aquariums and water the balcony and kind of clear up the kitchen* and the sitting room and sweep most of the flat and attempt to open and save my tax return** ..

..and I even showered.

I left later than I wanted to and then had to go back for my helmet. (Which I embarrassingly only noticed I wasn’t wearing because I wasn’t wearing my gloves and my handlebars felt weird.***)

But.

I still got to the bus on time.

See the clock in the background? that proves I was on time 😉

Or at least: I got to the bus before they stopped letting people onto it 🙂

And I wasn’t the last one to arrive.

The lady who arrived while they were hanging my bike on the hooks thanked me for getting her the extra time she needed to be able to catch the bus 🙂

What more can you want?

Yeah.

Ok.

Sleep’s important too.

Zzzzzzzzzzz

* kind of cleared up is basically an extravagant way of saying I emptied the table by piling things closer together on the work surface..

** the tax office loves playing the we’ll-delete-everything-you-haven’t-opened-in-a-while game with me. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose by a few days or, occasionally, minutes. This time I’m destined to lose because I couldn’t find the letter with the new secret code in it.. *sigh*

*** my gloves live in my helmet

Packing

Apparently normal people don’t wait until it’s 10 pm on the night before they leave to start packing.

It seems I am not normal people.

Also. I had started piling things up well in advance.

See! Even sorted into bags and baskets of similar things..

Not pictured: the piles/boxes of clothes, waterproof bags, food, ……… etc

And I didn’t have the baskets finished until 10pm.

Don’t tell me normal people don’t take until it’s nearly 10 pm on the night before they leave to get their baskets ready.

Hmm.

Those normal people might be onto something on the chance-of-giving-your-neighbour-a-heart-attack front.

Maybe also on the meltdow-esque ‘I’m-never-going-to-get-all-of-this-in-there!’ front..

🤔

Whatever.

That’s not how I roll.

The rest of the night passed in a blurry haze..

No way I’m showing you the unblurry version 😂

Getting rid of the squeaks

The old baskets squeaked on the pannier rack. I have no idea if the new ones will – I have just installed anti-squeak tubing 😉

I bought a couple of metres of dark grey aquarium hose pipe and slit it lengthwise with a pair of scissors.

Then I cut it to lengths that fit on the thicker metal bars on the top and side of the rack, cutting out little half circles to make them lie flat past the thinner bars.

Later: I begged some miniature cable ties off my neighbour and tied one around each piece of tubing (not pictured). They stayed on pretty well on their own, but I don’t expect them to stand up to a month of mistreatment without attempted mutiny.

Flapjack!

Is there any better Kalorienbombe to take cycling?

Is there any better way to make flapjack than via a late night Skype call with a friend? *

Bits missing? Nah.. the tin was a funny shape officer…

* (If so,. I imagine it only involves said friend also having the following day off work ;p)

Getting a laptop case, a baking tin, a rear light and a bit lost ;p

Laptop case

This one fits perfectly 🙂 and it has a pocket. Theoretically for the cable or a mouse but I have another case for cables. This is perfect for SD cards..

Baking tin

Leftover from a barbecue party in May.

Rear light

Super bright, clip on/silicone band. I’m not entirely sure it’s road legal on the brightest setting..

Losing track of the time

What’s the best thing to do when you have so much to do, you don’t know where to start?

Catch up with a friend you haven’t seen for a while 🙂

Obviously.

🙂

The wrong lake

‘Let’s meet by water feature at the palace we walked round’ he says.. ‘Right, I’ll head to the lake we walked round” she thinks.. Oops..

Getting in ~40 km and assorted small-ad pick ups while you’re at it is a bonus (or was that the other way round?)

Either way it was a pretty solidly packed evening, even without counting the time spent getting lost..

But then, as the saying goes,

If you don’t have time for a half hour break, you should take a full hour.

And it was all worth it. Even the wrong lake was beautiful.

New handlebar grips (parts 1 – 4)

Part 1

You know those things you’ve been putting off, and then need doing urgently just when it’s least convenient?

This is one such thing:

Falling apart..

They’re rubber and old and have been getting progressively stickier for quite a long time. I’ve been to bike shops and held various handlebars. I’ve looked at handlebar grips online. I’ve read articles about different shapes and sizes and materials. I’ve talked to the people I know about what they have and to people I don’t know about their experiences with horns.

I spent a lot of time thinking but zero time replacing.

And now the rubber is actually broken and I’m going on a 4 week cycling tour in less than a week…

It’s Saturday. I’ve been at work or otherwise busy during normal opening hours all week and had a list of things to talk to the bike shop about. I was comparatively prepared, considering how unprepared I actually am. And then they had the audacity to be closed. Seems I’m not the only one to go on holiday.

*sigh*

Time to look for a new bike shop.

Part 2

The search was slightly nervewracking but ultimately successful, which is the way things usually are..

The guy was great and even though I rolled in 10 minutes before closing time, he obligingly answered all my questions (I can still ride with scratched tyres, my chain was making weird noises because I threaded it the wrong way through the derailleur, saddles are weird but he doesn’t know where to get narrow woman’s saddles or short stubby-nosed man’s saddles) and sold me all the things (a spare inner tube – the last one in my size – and new(ish) handlebar grips with horns 😈) ..and he’s ordered a thing for mounting a bottle holder without drilling holes in the frame 🙂

The grips are ‘newish’ because they’d been taken off a different bike and put in a drawer of spares. They’re mostly fine, the horns are scuffed on the ends and they’re a bit grubby, but the rubber’s still good, almost new, and they were ridiculously cheap, cheaper than the cheap rubber hornless ones he had on the display and much cheaper than the leather or wooden ones I’d been considering.

The bike shop guy only pulled them out when he saw how miffed I was that he didn’t have any with horns for sale. I figured I need something asap and it can’t hurt to try these out. So here we are…

Part 3

They’re now mounted and ready to go 🙂

What a difference!

(picture taken and added later)

Part 4 – test ride(s)

Wheee!!

They took some adjusting – the horns and the grips are semi-independant, so setting them up involved multiple stops in a handful of kilometres to change all the angles – but they are so worth it.

Parked for inspection

I don’t remember reading an article about how much difference having the right handlebars make to speed, not that I’ve looked specifically, but I’m convinced they’ve added a couple of km/h.

Still got to get the hang of the horns though 🙂

New Thing (part 2 of X) neoprene case

I want to take my laptop with me. There’s something to be said for a keyboard.. I wanted to pack said laptop into something bike basket friendly, preferably also dust and waterproof. A neoprene case seemed to be a good idea.

Look what I found on the small ad site!

Awww!!

It’s too small for my laptop, but I wanted it anyway and all the cables and powerbanks fit in it 🙂