Initially it was a bright, sunny morning with little wind but soon, cloud gathered and these stayed with us for the remainder of the day. There was no hurry to get up and it wasn't until 10:00 that we were ready to do some sightseeing and shopping. Our first point of call was the 13^th century Church of St. Mary, the oldest building in Ystad. From the top of the tower, a horn blower signals that all is well, every 15 minutes, throughout the night ie no foreign invading ships, fires or foreign armies are threatening the town. This tradition has been going on since the 17^th century apparently, but I must confess either he’s on holiday or we’re too far away to hear, whatever the reason we didn’t hear or see anything. One of the features of the church are wonderful paintings on wood, looking like they date from the 1600’s or so. I managed to get a reasonable picture of one of them.



We then looked for the tourist office as we wanted to check there that the only sensible option that Jeff & Greta Layton, who are joining us next Friday, flying into Stockholm, have is to hire a car and drive down . However, their opening times were 12:00 – 16:00 on Saturdays, so we decided to do some food shopping instead, especially as the weather had deteriorated somewhat, with occasional drops of rain falling.

After lunch and with no rain, we did a little more sightseeing. Ystad has many old buildings and some lovely little back streets and it is well worth a few hours’ exploring. This is where Henning Mankell based his famous Kurt Wallander novels and I can see why he would have thought the town to be a suitable backdrop. One other thing we liked about the town were the bright purple trains – that brought to mind the Prince song 'Purple Rain’ – they should create an advert for their trains using the chorus ‘Purple Trains, Purple Trains etc etc’. Actually, they are nearer a lilac colour but that ruins the whole idea!

The tourist office were helpful, but couldn’t come up with a better suggestion than the car hire option for Jeff & Greta and having confirmed this, we headed off back to the boat. Once there, I spent some time blogging whilst listening to ‘Any Questions’ on iPlayer. It’s so nice being connected again, we really miss Radio 4. For dinner that night we had gravadlax (gravad lax is Swedish for cured salmon) followed by pizza and for afters, another episode of ‘The Killing’.