Today was an ebb-and-flow kind of day. The rain came and went and came and went and came and went. My touristic planning went from plan to improvise to replan and reimprovise. The touristic results went from wow to ehh to okay to wet to okay to good to okay to good.

The forecast called for rain in the morning, but that was easy, since I had indoor plans until 11:00. Online, I had stumbled across a cello player in the region named Petronella Torin, whose website had a “book me” link, so I got in touch. She was willing to play and sing Swedish folk songs for us for an hour, and for a rate that was more or less in line with good seats at a Cleveland theater.

That was a fun time. Mer and I have never been to a private concert before, and Petronella was affable, taking time to explain the cello and what the songs were about. She warmed up with two Bach pieces which she played deftly, and then she played and sang for the rest of the time. Her cello is over two hundred years old, so the sound is full and rich. She took time to answer our questions, and we really enjoyed the entire experience.

Petronella had mentioned a waterfall in one of the stories of her songs, and it was nearby, so we went to see it. It was in a small nature preserve, and when we got there, it started drizzling, even though we’d seen no rain since heading out today. But the path was in a leafy forest, so the rain mostly didn’t get in. The walk was in slightly rolling hills and in the woods, so it was nice in a Cuyahoga Valley National Park sort of way. When I saw that one path looked as if it led down to the stream and was very muddy, and I didn’t know how long the other trail was, I decided to take the shorter inner loop and go back to the car. I wasn’t sure it was worth the touring time.

The rain had stopped, and I drove the short way on to Vik. One website I had read had mentioned a couple of coastal towns as being cute to wander in, so that was my itinerary for the day. Vik turned out to be a tiny hamlet of one-way roads that led to a parking lot that had a path to the sea. The “beach” was made up of rocky slabs, although we could see sandy beaches further up the shore. Oddly, on a sometimes rainy, windy, fifty-degree day, we were the only ones on the beach. We found a rock and sat and watched the waves for a few minutes. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t a main street to wander down, so I checked my next two towns. One was even smaller, but Simrishamn had about seven thousand people, so we drove there.

We parked near signs for the harbor, and as we got out of the car, it started sprinkling again. Since the forecast hadn’t called for any rain, neither of us had umbrellas, but we did have rain jackets, so we were fine with showers. We walked along the harbor, which was oddly isolated, and headed in the direction of town (away from the very extensive beach). The more we walked, the heavier the rain got. As we got to the main street of the town, I was pretty much looking for any place to eat that was under cover. We found one, and got settled outside under a canopy when the rain intensified to a full-on steady rain. I told Mer to take her time eating.

By the time we were done eating, the rain stopped. We took the improved weather as a chance to explore the town, but it wasn’t very extensive – a couple of streets of nice shops and a few cute homes. We headed back to the car, keeping right on the shore of the sea, and we discovered a small, pretty seating area and got a better look at the rain-free harbor. When we got to the beach, we walked out on it for a short distance, but we didn’t go very far because the sand was very hard to walk in.

I was determined to do better, so I headed us back to Kaseberga, where we had seen the ship stones the night before. We hadn’t seen the pier or the town, so I wanted to correct that.

I’m glad we went to see the stones last night. When we pulled in to the parking lot at 3:00, it was pretty much full and included a couple of buses. We walked into town and then down the road to the pier area, which was away from the town, since the town was built behind the cliff top, presumably to keep it out of the wind. On the way down, we spotted four windsurfers out on the water doing their thing. They were having a good day of it today with pretty high winds.

We walked along the base of the pier, which was made up of restaurants, a cafe, a few souvenir shops, and a small fish shipping warehouse. We then walked out to the end of the pier, where we watched much more active waves and had a fun time watching the various windsurfers. One man rode right by us on his way in to the shore, and his board was about two feet out of the water, with only the stabilizer still under the waves. It looked fun.

We walked back up to the car and stumbled across the surfer as we went though the town. We told him we’d had fun watching him and asked him how long he had been surfing. He smiled and said, “A long time.” That was why it looked like fun – he knew what he was doing.

And so back to Ystad. As we got back to the hotel, it started raining again, so I took thirty minutes to do some work stuff. We went to wander the town randomly to see what we could find. We found several cute houses and a few half-timbered ones that were clearly old. We happened upon the old monastery, which is now a town museum, and the grounds and gardens around the building were pretty. By then, it was 6:00, so I found us a place to eat on the square, and we were the only ones sitting outside at the pub. The food was good, but so was sitting in such a pretty place.

After supper, we wanted to explore more of the town, so I downloaded a map from the tourism bureau. It showed twenty-two buildings to find, but they were all in a weird order, so I decided  just to look at the ones we happened to be close to. We started with the theater, but were puzzled how to find it when it dawned on us it was the building we were standing in front of with our backs to it. It mentioned an elegant facade, so we went around the building to see it, finally getting to it on the fourth try.

We then failed to find the old Latin school building immediately, and then laughed when the front had a large sign identifying it. We had trouble making the map line up with St. Mary’s church, and then we went all around the old city hall before finding the front and verifying that it was what we were looking for.

We ended up going down a long pedestrian street just to see it, but it took us to the longest half-timbered building street in the Nordic countries (almost a whole block long). There was another old (1700s) half-timbered building around the corner from it was well.

Our phone-guided tour had taken place in a little rain at the start, but by the end, the day was very sunny and pleasant. It was a good way to end the day – seeing sights and laughing at our own foolishness at missing obvious buildings. Tomorrow we start heading back north, but along the west coast side of Sweden this time.