Skånes Fagerhult a little piece of paradise.

Rosi relaxing while Julian plays with a fishing rod, note bbq in foreground

I found this airfield from the ffplume French document about travelling by ultralight in Europe and it is a little gem.  I have linked to the Belgian page on which I originally found this document, as they have many other useful suggestions on their website.

The airfield's owner, Bo, has built a log cabin which you can hire by the night, with kitchen, bathrooms, washing machine and most importantly, sauna. The airstrip is on a lake (overshoot the 550m runway and you'll be in it!) and you can watch the lake, your plane and the spotty Indian ponies grazing by the lake from the dining table. Being Sweden it is surrounded by light birch forest.

The lake, ponies hiding

Naturally we had to cycle around the lake system (bike hire included in the hut price) and then Cris heard about 10kg pikes living inthe depths of the lake, so he was off on a mission to find hooks for the fishing rods so he could row the boat out and catch the big one for our dinner...  Well the big one ended up being 4 tiddlers who had to be thrown back, but I think fishing is more about the expectation than the actual result.

View out on the lake from the dining table

Love those Swedish tea light holders

That evening Bo came around with his 10 year old daughter, Amanda, to give us a go on his old farm machinery...  He has 500 ton of machinery, mostly acquired as scrap, which he has brought back into working condition. Every child's dream came true as we used the digger to move a mound of earth into a tip truck, lowered a giant pencil suspended from the pail of another digger into various buckets in a time trial and drove the steam roller.....

Julian learning to use the digger

Amanda was of course better and faster than us, but a good time was had by all.  So if you're thinking of flying from Southern Sweden to Stockholm, can I heartily recommend a stopover at Skaanes Fagerhult as a peaceful way of spending an evening or several?

Cycling south from Bonn to the spectacular Drachenfels

When we told the locals that we intended to cycle north to Cologne, they earnstly informed us that we would be much better off riding south long the Rhein, as it's one of the loveliest rides in Germany. Well I can't comment on that, but it was a truly stunning ride - many tree lined alleys and parks.
It's amazing how important hills are to making an attractive landscape, and putting castles on top of them does add to ther attractiveness, so we made sure we flew past the Drachenfels (dragon cliff) when we left Bonn.

To Cologne and back with our bikes*

Some of the sights along the way, as well as the famous cathedral.
* n.b. i didn't say we cycled all the way...

Lunching in the cathedral square

Cycling in to Cologne, just before we gave up and got the train :-)

Isn't this cathedral fantastic, the tower climb was probably the best I have done in terms of beauty of the building from the inside. And oddly enough about a year later I am still returning to climb it in my dreams.

Scarves

Well I've finally finished those scarves.  I found a web tutorial in how to create a hand rolled hem, which in truth is a lovely thing, but it took me 3h to do the hem on the pink & black spotted scarf (total length at fabric width of 1.4m & piece of 25cm wide = 3.3m of hem).  The other silk is a lot heavier and I just sewed a roll together and turned it inside out which was much much simpler.  But I prefer the spotty one.

The above is an image from a couple of weeks in the future.  I will put up some photos of the scarves on their own soon.