There has been some long weeks in Sweden, even if I spent time meeting friends most of the time has been waiting for the bank and their papers to arrive. Since I haven’t been able to know when they would arrive and make sure that they were returned immediately I just had to stay put and wait, which has been frustrating.

But as I wrote in the last post that is now behind me! I’m so happy for that, and it rendered a trip to Gothenburg to meet some friends to celebrate. First stop was Örebro though, to meet a friend that I haven’t met for years. Some beers, some indian food, great company and a good nights sleep really picked me up, even if I had a ticket for the train leaving at 8:00 in the morning and I had to get up way too early for my taste.

Once in Gothenburg I met my host for the coming two nights, we had a fantastic lunch at Sjöbaren (totally recommend this place!) and then I went back to the apartment for a little nap (travelling always makes me tired!) before I met a dear friend in Heaven23 and had the obligatory shrimp sandwich (a mountain of shrimps on a thin slice of bread), with a trailing chocolate desert. The food was as always, fantastic, but the company was second to none. After the dinner we went to the bar downstairs and we both ordered a “Dark Side of the Moon” – and got a pair of drinks as different as night and day. You see, I have this little fun challenge whenever I get to a bar that looks like they have bartenders worth the name (well, some times I don’t care about that, I do it anyway) and there is time. What I do is ordering the aforementioned drink and give them free reign. Do whatever you think is “The Dark Side of the Moon” – I want your interpretation. Which usually ends up with a fun drink that I have no clue how it will taste or what’s in it. This time it was a whiskey-based drink, with a smoother sort in the drink and then on the top a smoky, tarry Lagavulin. I normally stay away from whiskey, but this drink was quite nice. In the beginning the Lagavulin decided everything, but in the end it was more like a whiskey sour. I liked the smokey aftertaste, it reminded me of my favourite tea, lapsang soushong, that greets me with the tarry smell every time I open my tea cupboard.

On my last Saturday in Sweden I went to Bishop’s Arms on Avenyn to meet up with some friends that had figured out that I was in town. There was a lot of questions of course, but also memories was shared and a few beers as well! It was a great evening, but eventually it was getting late and I had to hit the hay. On Sunday I managed to squeeze in lunch with friends and then a trip to Säve to watch a birthday present being delivered in BodyFlight. I have never seen such large smiles before! It took me back to the days when I was parachuting. It wasn’t many jumps all in all, but I do remember the feeling of jumping out of the plane and quickly falling to the ground, playing around in the wind while doing it. Later we went to their home, where we had “Mange-tacos”, apparently named after me. For some reason I had managed to make an imprint so whenever someone made a taco that wasn’t possible to close properly, it was it. It’s always nice to meet this family! I was picked up the next afternoon by a mutual friend of ours and we ended that day with kebab-pizza and killing zombie nazis on his PS3. All great fun!

As Tuesday arrived, it was time to say good-bye and once again head towards Örebro, as the flight was on Wednesday and I had promised to drop by this friend if I ever had the chance, since the first one was missed. So I did. I arrived in a rain-touched Örebro and I was really feeling home sick, to the sun and warmth of southern Spain. But the company balanced it out and we had a great evening, talking about pretty much everything, anything and all in between. The sofa was turned into a temporary bed and Tuesday turned into Travelday.

Flying back to Malagá took four hours, and boy am I glad that I bought my new headset, the Sony WH-1000MX4! I was listening to music and slumbering almost all the way, but every now and then I had to remove the headphones and the noise was so loud! I mean, the headset is in no way perfect, only having the noise-cancelling on will remove most of the noise, but you can still hear it. But it is more like a nice train ride rather than sitting in an aluminium tube with two roaring jet engines strapped to it travelling at 800 km/h. Oh, talking about train rides. There they really excel, I couldn’t hear anything when I had them on riding a train. It was just silence, with my choice of noise playing in them. Sound-wise they are totally acceptable, I was expecting a little more base from the get-go, but all that can be modified in the app, so it was a good buy. My main issue now is to make sure I don’t lose them in any way or destroys them, but keeping them in the supplied case will make that harder at least. I will use them extensively as I edit videos in the future, for sure.

So, I’m currently back on the boat since almost a week now, after being picked up by my boat neighbor late in the evening when I arrived in Malagá, or early in the night if you want, spent a few days “landing”, sketching my new electrical system and playing around with my new.. well.. it isn’t a toy per se but I guess many will see it as one – my electric scooter! It was delivered on the day I left, so it was a bit frustrating not to be able to test it before I left, but it was sweet to have it waiting as I came home. The only thing was to get it to the boat, oh my god… I know, it is an electric scooter, right? I could just have unpacked it and ride it to the boat? Well, “some assembly may be required” and it was a huge box so I didn’t dare to unpack it at the pickup spot if there were many parts and I didn’t have the tools. As I walked there to pick it up I didn’t remember how much it weighted, but I mean, how heavy can it be, right? Well, it can. It weighs 30kg! And the box was so large I couldn’t get a good grip around it, fortunately there was three straps around it, so I could hold on to something at least. But they cut into my fingers, so they were no use carrying it. I asked if they had a cart or something that I could use, but no. Okay, only solution – get it up on my shoulder and carry it all the way. Try carry a 120x30x60cm carton box weighing 30kgs on your shoulders for a kilometer. In the sun. So add sweating to it, with a slippery surface on the box. It was a work out! On the final stretch a helpful couple asked if I needed help, but honestly, the only way to carry it was on the shoulder and it would probably just complicate things being two. But, hey, I’m not complaining! Even if it might have sounded a bit like that… It’s all good, really.

But now I have a ride! It will take me 40km on a charge and will definitely make life a bit easier, especially since getting around will be so much quicker. I don’t mind walking, but if it takes me 30 minutes to get to the store and back instead of five minutes I will spend time moving when it should be spent on planning, working, enjoying life and, most importantly, writing about it so that you can follow my adventures! Which has shown being an issue, since it is so long between my updates.

To be fair, I’ve been wrestling with getting the few pictures taken with my old and tired iPad to my blog, which has been a bit amusing and an exercise in troubleshooting and finding inventive ways of getting images from one device to another. Cable? Nope, won’t show any pictures that way. I made email drafts, adding images on one device and opening them on the other, which has worked before, but even that stopped working. I then realized that the WordPress app on my iPad can upload to the media vault of the blog. Uhm.. No, not really, it just stood there for some time and then crashed or gave me a non-descriptive error message. It all rolls back to that the iPad is full. Everything is painful to use on it, it crashes, it is super slow and most of the time just won’t work. Forget about switching between two apps, only the running app is kept alive, the rest are unceremoniously killed without any questions. Lately it has also asked me to log in with my Apple account all the time. I just need to get these images here and then I can reset the device, so frustrating! So I removed some films I had on it, of me mucking around in the boat and other stuff, and it got a little bit of a revival, actually! So now I can finally upload images again. Yay! (I was pretty much done with this text this Saturday!)

So, what is next? Well, as I’ve been here all these days now I have had a little time sketching my new electrical setup. It will be transformed in several steps, but the first one is to replace the batteries, get the new charger/inverter in place as well as the isolation transformer and connect it to the current cables. Then I will be truly disconnected from the shore-power and hopefully my sacrificial anodes won’t be sacrificed quite as fast as they probably are at the moment. After that I will replace pieces as I go, add some more 230V sockets so that I don’t have to use extension cords as soon as I want power anywhere away from the galley or salon.

I will update as soon as I got something more to write about, I ordered some things that will definitely make life a bit comfortable but I will write about it when the order arrives.