Every day of our holiday so far, rain has been promised. And it hasn’t rained. Until today. Suddenly, from mid-morning, it deluged. And how. We abandoned our plans, in favour of a tour of Gothenburg’s Northern Archipelago. Which has a ridiculous number of islands. One or two are biggish, and can support a population of 5000 or so. Others are so small they probably aren’t on the map, and there wouldn’t even be room enough for my 2 year old granddaughter to sit down.
We caught a bus to a tiny landing port half an hour outside Gothenburg so we could catch the ferry to the Big Island, Hönö. It’s a car ferry – they all are – and passenger comfort is not really a consideration. But (a) our first voyage was only 6 minutes long and (b) it was completely free. We never saw a member of staff all day, in any of these free ferries.
So a couple of ferries go back and forth, back and forth between the mainland and Hönö, while others service the other islands. Once landed, we had time for a ferry-terminal kind of lunch (it wasn’t bad) before catching a bus across the island. We were a bit surprised to find we’d travelled across not one, but three islands, courtesy of causeways we hadn’t realised were causeways. Blame the rain. Two more ferries. Two more islands.
We loved it. We enjoyed the views of all these gaunt and rocky islands, mainly unpopulated apart from cormorants and gulls. Many people choose to live on the bigger islands. It’s hard to know why. They’re crowded with houses but few facilities, and may well be inaccessible during winter storms. We spotted one church, one supermarket and a propellor factory in our meanderings.
I even got a bit of a walk along the coastal path on Hälsö. It had stopped raining for 10 minutes.
As rainy days go, this went rather well. We didn’t get all THAT wet.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
You must be logged in to post a comment.