July 16, Tuesday

Blogs have been down, but we’re back baby! An early Tuesday morning got us back on the bikes, off the island of Ven, and on to another ferry to mainland Sweden. We began biking south again towards Malmö, taking in the beautiful cloudless day on the western Swedish shoreline. A big chunk of the group stayed together for most of the first half of the ride and we stopped on the side of the road next to some very healthy looking cows. A lady came off the road next to the cows who talked to us for a bit about our journey. She was a lawyer for Lund University who had worked in San Diego for a while until coming back to Sweden to raise cattle. She talked about raising “climate cows,” referring to her raising them in a sustainable, justified way where the cows live happy lives until they are slaughtered for beef. She said that salt comes in from the sea on to the fields where the cows graze, providing key nutrients and antibiotics that make the cows healthier and create better beef. Sweden is one of the only places in the world where this salt phenomenon exists for cows and many other farms provide these nutrients artificially. 

Mikah and I stopped for lunch in a tiny town that we never found out the name of, but we got salads in a grocery store for cheap and ate them on some grass outside. We continued on, stopping a few times before reaching the Oh Boy Hotel in Malmö. I noticed that the entire ride down was on a bike path, even if that was right next to a road or was also a pedestrian path. This makes it quite easy for bikers to navigate long distances in Sweden, quite similar to the extended bike paths in Denmark. 

After a quick recovery in Oh Boy, a few of us headed down to the water which was nearby. There was a really nice swimming spot called Scaniabadet that had a few docks that we jumped off of. We enjoyed the sun and the waves before heading to a nearby park for a pizza party with the group. Later, we hung around our hotel and I played spoons and Texas hold ‘em with Brenna, Mikah, Tenley, Eric, Ryan, and Fin.