Visby, Day 3

We spent our last day in Visby wandering through old streets and sitting on the beach. The last chance to find more sea glass and pick up a few gifts to send back to the UK. Gotland has been hit hard by the pandemic so we decided to support local businesses and do some early Christmas shopping. We also found some really tasty chocolate biscuits to eat on the journey home.

I collected loads of little pieces of sea glass from this beach! Most were quite small but I’d occasionally find a big piece like this one.

I walked further along the beach and big pebbles became tiny fragments. The sight of them took me back to looking into the container of my Mum’s cremation ashes on a beach (which to my suprise, looked more like gravel). This trip was the first beach visit since that day. I thought about scattering her into the water and realised that every time I visit the ocean, there’s a small chance she might be near. She’s probably not made it up to Sweden yet but I like the idea that she could. Sounds depressing but it was actually quite a nice realisation.

Food on the ferry wasn’t great so we decided to have a bigger lunch at a pizza place with outdoor seating. Scott’s pizza came with the most horrendous looking ham. He ate a tiny bit but couldn’t face the rest so we hatched a plan. We hid it all in a napkin, left the restaurant with a handbag full of meat and chucked it in a bin down the road. Scott didn’t have to eat it; the restaurant owner didn’t think he was weird for leaving the “best bit” of the pizza. Everyone wins.

I thought about putting it on the beach for the seagulls but a) I didn’t know if seagulls eat ham, b) they probably would have just looked at it with the same level of disgust we did, c) if the ham killed them, it would have been a terrible last meal and d) it looked so awful I felt bad even offering to greedy seagulls.

The journey to Gotland felt like a bit of a germfest so we went straight up to the outdoor deck on the way back, even though the skies were looking moody.

The wind really picked up an hour into the journey. Luckily the panel behind us was an excellent wind break. I was nearly blown along the unsheltered deck area a couple of times so I didn’t venture there without holding a handrail in the end — especially after seeing other people try it. Worth it for the photos though! We felt like the hardiest people in all the land.

Going home was funny this time around. Visby was our first holiday since arriving in Sweden. Last year, going home meant flying back to the UK. This time we were headed back to Stockholm. It was a nice feeling.