Things often don’t go as planned. In our minds, we were going to be driving back to Sweden at a slow pace – visiting several places on our way back. The reality turned out to be different. Due to some misunderstandings and “not-so-well-made-plans,” we ended up driving back to Sweden like maniacs! It took us 3 days of driving and now we have arrived!

Three days of driving about twelve hours a day

So we arrived in Huelva after 33 hours on the ferry (without a cabin). It was a rough trip, that’s for sure! We tried to sleep in bright light and people and children talking and screaming. For some reason – it seems like it is ok for six-year-olds to be up all night when traveling on a ferry from Tenerife to Huelva?! Let’s just say that we didn’t get that much sleep!

And just to make it a little worse – the sea was pretty rough so I had a hard time walking around and spent most of the time lying down. So it was a really happy couple that drove off the ferry after the 33 hours. We had finally arrived in Huelva. First stop – heading to Portugal to stock up on wine!

Buying wine in Portugal

One thing that we have come to love, spending seven months in Portugal, is their wine. Not only is it good – it’s also really cheap. You can buy a bag-in-box with five liters of wine for seven euros, how great is that?! And when our friends and family heard about that, they all wanted us to buy some Portuguese wine for them! We arrived at 21.00 and drove straight to Olhao, and the huge store “Continente”. We arrived 30 minutes before closing and headed straight into the store with a shopping cart!

In the end, we bought so much wine that we had to empty out all fresh water from our holding tank, not to be overweight. No worries, only a few bottles were for us – the rest was to friends and family. I also stocked up on olive oil, because Portuguese olive oil is the best. Since tryingPortuguese olive oil – we have replaced all our oils to Portuguese oils. They are super fresh and taste really nice.

Driving and driving and driving

The next morning, we started out really early and started our journey back to Sweden. It isn’t fun to drive for a full day but at the same time, it was ok with a lot of talking about life in general. We talked a lot about our future plans and how we want to continue with the website and future plans that we have. We also made a few notes during the ride. Some of them are…

• There are NO Mcdonalds when you choose to avoid the toll roads. We ended up eating sandwiches that I made in the car for breakfast, lunch and dinner the first day.
• You drive through loads of beautiful small towns and villages when avoiding the toll roads.
• Gas is super expensive in France!
• McDonald’s in Belgium serves breakfast all day.

Getting to Sweden

It was awesome to arrive in Sweden and we are still figuring out when to meet all of our friends. And I love the fact that we are so spoiled. There is no need to cook for ourselves – we eat dinner at our parent’s house now and I love it. Fingers crossed that this will stick for a while. But there is so much to do right now that it’s crazy.

We have articles to write for magazines which is awesome but at the same time, we want to spend time with our family –  it’s hard to balance both things at the same time. Next weekend we are heading for Stockholm for a week or two. I have already started to make a schedule on how to fit everything in when being there. But we don’t complain, it feels great to be here for a while and then we will be off again!