Ystad Bicycle Champions! (Into the Wind)

Hi! We are two-wheel superstars! We spent the weekend pedaling roughly 40 kilometers over the rolling fields of the kommun. (We'll post a traced routemap with approximated disances soon.) It was a beautiful, sunny, windy weekend for our foray. We bought barn/cyckel (child/bike) tickets for our bikes to ride with us on the pågatåg through Malmö to Ystad.



At the station, we parked and locked our bikes, stored our bags and strolled around the monk-market. It's a yearly street-strolling market-cart affair. Merchants wear monk's robes, and one in ten is selling donuts, the word for which in the Swedish language, munk, is synonymous with monk. We didn't buy any donuts, and made it back to our bikes at around 6:00. We mounted up and rode westward along the coast and a bit north into the country to our hostel in Snårestad.



The hostel was billed as "Like a hotel, but cheaper!". In fact, it was not much like a hotel. It was more like a prison, with echoing halls and thick metal doors. It was okay, and breakfast was pretty good (eggs, sandwiches, muesli, coffee...), but we decided to unbook our second night and seek lodging elsewhere on Saturday. As we were going to ride that day to the historical stone monument Ales Stenar, we booked a room at STF Vandrarhem Backåkra. There's a nice run of designated bike trails through Ystad to Nybro. After that, it became an arduous ride in close traffic on road 9, a major coastal roadway. Around three o'clock, we arrived in Kåseberga at Ales Stenar.



These are supposed to have been erected around 500 AD. Not as old or as big as stonehenge, but with a feeling like that, and quite a view from the south-facing seaside cliffs of Skåne.

We picked up a giant ice cream cone and some smoked fish for dinner at Kåseberga's harbor and made it to our new digs around 5:00. We found ourselves bunked in a separated, curtained alcove in a dorm room. It was neat and clean. We shared the total space with 6 other groups, complete with elephant-walkers and jittery sugar-rush children, but it was no big deal.. and it was cheaper.
That evening, we rode the short couple of kilometers to Löderup's beach. It was chilly enough that we didn't want to swim, but got to wade a little.



The next morning we had a really fabulous breakfast buffet at Jakob's Café, with homemade breads, muesli, soft cheese, and peanut butter (among many other delicious things!). We took the day to visit several other towns dotting the wheatfields of the region.



It was a much nicer ride with hardly any other vehicular traffic. The wind, pretty consistently throughout the day, however, was really quite a...


(speed impediment... heh heh)

We made it back to Ystad sooner than we exected, and were back in Lund in time for dinner. What a weekend! Please be sure to browse the Ystad's Kommun album on Webshots. And catch up with some videos from the trip, too.

-J.