Quiet Weekend - Ullared and Bike Riding (14-May)

This weekend was planned to be a nice quiet one - we'd had so many busy weekends lately and lot of excitement coming up so we really just needed to unwind.

But there was one hitch - as always..  The kids needed new clothes.  A combination of moths (the polite term for children chewing their shirts), growth spurts (making some of Alana's shirts and shorts a little indecent) and general wear-and-tear (if this includes diving off of bikes onto gravel, climbing through rose bushes and somehow getting tangled on door handles) has left the kids short of clothing.

Kris had heard about an outlet shop called Syd Central so we headed there.  They had a huge Stadium sports shop outlet and we picked up some nice gear for the kids, but it wasn't enough!  So we decided to bite-the-bullet, risk our sanity and head out to Gekås at Ullared.  We'd been there once before, its a huge shopping centre with massive crowds, bogans, trolley jams and people wearing things that would put Walmart to shame, but a decent range of clothes at decent prices.

Gekås

The roads on the way up were awesome.  I could see why yellow is such an iconic colour in Sweden - all of the Canola (its actually Rape - a breed of canola) was in bloom on the sides of the road:

Such a vivid yellow!

More yellow

At Gekås we managed to get some decent gear for the kids and few things for us.  I did think for a little about getting a few shirts and shorts shown below, but I valued my marriage too much to ever consider it too seriously..

Nothing says Sweden like pink pineapples

Except maybe pink fish (salmon pink?)

And the matching pink palm tree shorts..

With a nice pair of thongs (flip-flops) I could make a fashion statement that would make most of the patrons of Gekås proud!

On the way out we also found that the Swedish word for urinal turns out to be a little blunt to an English speaker:

At least you know what it's for..

On Sunday we went for our usual bike ride to the park for another soccer game of Messi-Bedroom vs Dadaldo.  This time I was a little distracted by the broken glass that was everywhere so while I was picking it up, Messi-Bedroom (aka Cameron) managed to edge in a solid win.

Tom found a walking stick

But there wasn't much need for walking - he's really got the hang of riding now!

And the classic art of standing in the middle of the road to make his brother crash.

And to add to the awesome yellow of the Rape, our apple trees are all in bloom and attracting the massive fuzzy Swedish bees:

The bees are enormous!

So all-in-all it was nice to finally have a relaxing weekend and to restock on clothes, there's a lot coming up soon so we're going to need all the energy we have...