Butterflies and bumblebees

I’ve seen a variety of butterfly gardens, but this one in Karlskoga is also for bees. There are even a couple of bee-houses, each of different construction. I spent a little while learning to use the aperture priority on my new camera so I could take more satisfying pics of the critters, though they still don’t hold still for long.

From the park, we wended our way down into town, with a side trip up past a pretty wooded cemetery and thence to the top of a hill with an overlook across Lake Möckeln. It was a beautiful day for a walk, and we even found both raspberries and blueberries (happy birthday, Mom!).

At the bakery in town, I found another entry for my collection of “fun desserts made using sheets of green marzipan” — because in a country where that’s a grocery store staple, there should be a proliferation of little green monsters. Though this one consisted largely of sugar, not so much on the princesstorta-inspired contents. I’ll keep working on it.

Karlskoga has an extensive network of bike/foot paths, very friendly once you know where they are. (Google’s pedestrian directions don’t. Which would have been useful information that first night when we were carrying both packs and a fiddle, and it wanted to send us on highways.) Our route home from town to the youth hostel took us past the extensive park that reaches along most of the town’s lakefront. There were lots of folks out enjoying the evening, swimming or cycling or picnicking or water-skiing,… we were speculating that there might be room for the entire population of 27,000 people to stretch out in the parks without crowding each other.

The youth hostel is run by the Karlskoga Folkhögskola, which has an extensive campus. Our room in one of the frontmost buildings was pretty ritzy by hostel standards, although it is only a “double” room by virtue of having a narrow couch that converts to a bed — I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a “single” room when only one person wants it. But still: bright and clean, private bathroom, nice kitchen facilities, wifi (that works somewhat sporadically), quiet and scenic setting.

Getting out of town again was something of a trick. We still can’t buy tickets online directly from SJ.se, which is where we can get all our timetable info, because the site no longer likes my credit cards now that I’m in Sweden. (The same cards worked from home.) So we went down to the bus station, where they informed us we’d need to get tickets from the store a couple blocks away. Said store said no, you need to get tickets for just the first part of your trip from the bus station. Bus station said, we can’t sell you tickets but you can just buy them on the bus. Happily, that worked fine, and then we bought train tix for the next phase of the journey once we got to Örebro.