2025-04 – Car Purchase

This month I looked hard for a car for my wife. She passed her Swedish driving test in the automatic category and our current car was a manual transmission. I wanted to get my wife driving fairly soon after the test so that she could build on the received training, as opposed to leaving it longer.

Saving Money

Because it was going to be a bit of money we didn’t do much else this month except work. We did visit a large town to the south. We also looked for some cafes locally to the north that we had not been to before but it’s not yet tourist season so they aren’t all open.

Weather

Although the snow melted and disappeared much earlier this year, it’s still dropped below zero most nights and we had two brief snow storms. The garden is slowly waking up however, and we worked to clear out the greenhouse to prepare it for the growing season.

The daylight-hours overtook the UK this month and the sine-wave graph of daylight hours is at its steepest about now. Towards the end of end of April things are getting noticeably bright.

Maintenance

With the good weather we also oiled the deck inside the greenhouse, and the deck attached to the house which helps the deck last longer.

I also packed away winter equipment like the snow-thrower (snowblower in the US) and the spark (a kick-sleigh). I collected in the red and white marker poles used to mark obstacles and paths in the snow. I also went litter picking to pick up a lot of the wind-blown litter than had been trapped under the snow in autumn and winter.

Music

I also practised guitar a lot, but I need to expand the number of songs I use for practise. In hindsight my guitar teacher when I was young provided a lot of direction to my guitar playing which I lost when I went to university and maybe I didn’t appreciate enough at the time.

I tried to make contact with some local music teachers to set up private lessons but haven’t yet had any luck.

Choosing a Car

Most car shopping is done on a website called blocket (blocket.se) which is like a Swedish version of ebay. However there’s less people in Sweden, and the major cities are a long way from us in the north of Sweden so the choice was a little smaller than somewhere like the south of the UK.

If I traded in our current var versus one of the same value we would get a low value offer for the current car. So there would be an overlap period that made finances a bit tighter this month but no great stress.

There’s also a limit to what we can fit in the garage along with gardening supplies and workshop equipment. We will also have to have a big garage clearout before next winter because it’s important to try and store vehicles indoors during the coldest winter months to reduce deterioration.

We went to look at one car similar to our current one. It was a bit rusty, and the inside was a working farmhouse car with animal hair everywhere. It was more expensive than our original car had been but not as good – the used car market has gone a bit crazy.

In the end I identified a car that was small, but fun, and automatic. It would potentially be a good first car that would be easy to park and fun to drive through the summer and so encourage gaining driving experience. We might even fit it in the garage with another car so we could both commute to jobs if we had to in the future. It looked good in the photos.

Car Dealer

Eventually we drove down 2 hours to a car dealer in a city to the south, having found one that was open on the bank holiday.

I think I immediately identified myself to the saleperson as non-swedish by getting down on the floor in the dust to look underneath the car and in the wheelarches with a torch.

We got a lot off the marked price, but in hindsight the car had so many repairs needed that I could have beaten the seller down much further. It’s likely this was a trade-in by a previous customer versus a much more expensive car. It was however what we needed.

Getting the Car Home

The bit I was worried about was getting the car home, because getting the bus or train to the dealer had been prohibitively difficult so I’d had to drive. That mean the first solo car trip by my wife would be 2 hours on one of the fastest roads in Sweden in an unfamiliar car.

I drove behind and created a small buffer between my wife and other cars. This mostly worked, so when we were leaving the dealers and joining the main road north an accidental miss-route wasn’t a big deal and the wife had space to correct her lane on a roundabout and rejoin the right route.

First Time as a Passenger

The next day we took the car out to visit a local cafe. Sat in the passenger seat, it was immediately apparent there was something wrong. The rear suspension was making a metal-on-metal noise over bumps and there was a constant squeaking noise. We cut the trip short and returned home and I booked it in with the local garage.

I gave the mechanics a list of the issues I could find and asked them to inspect and service it as well, and to make everything right. That was a week ago and it’s been with the mechanics for at least two days now. I think this will be expensive to repair but it is important to get it done.

Cycling

I went out cycling after the car drama.

I got off to a bad start, by taking the wrong route into the forest and upsetting a property owner, who came out to intercept me. It was a fairly friendly encounter – I just explained in Swedish that I was trying to reach the forest and they responded in broken English with words to the effect that it was a track that went to the forest but they didn’t want people using it. There had been a no vehicles sign so I had walked with the bike – I wasn’t sure if a bike translated as a vehicle. There is a right to roam rule in Sweden but it doesn’t apply close to peoples houses, and all the routes into this specific forest section are near peoples houses, so I had to take a longer route around and up a forestry vehicle access road.

The paths inside the forest also aren’t well defined. What starts as a vehicle track becomes a footpath, and then a hint of a footpath with some routes appearing on some maps and not on others, and the designation and rules being unclear. For example there’s no clear designation of footpath-only routes compared to a UK OS countryside map that I could find for this local forest. So I’m not totally sure if I’m breaking rules by riding there, but there is noone else there and the bikes does a lot less damage than the forestry vehicles.

I couldn’t find the turning that would take me to the local cabin. I tried backtracking and re-riding the route but the wooden turning signs maybe didn’t survive the winter and I couldn’t find it.

Frustratingly the GPS indicated I was only 250m from my goal so I tried just walking through the forest in a straight line to my goal, with the classic phrase “how hard can it be?” in my head. After about 25 meters I met a 10m steep rocky cliff and then had to fight my way through bushes, a clear-felled mossy area and then a rocky climb. All of these were tricky to navigate whilst carrying a bike.

Along the way I did find a pretty clearing with blue flowers everywhere. It was hard to photograph however as I only had a longer-range lens with me.

At the cabin I discovered the flagpole in ruins. It looks like the fibreglass top of the pole had become brittle with age and the large flag and possibly the nearby tree had caused it to snap off.

I de-tangled the flag and put it inside the cabin. I then removed the line from the tree and recorded in the visitor book what had happened. I’ll message the maintainers and see if I can help.

Next Month

I don’t want to commit to too many things but May is normally not short on tasks that need doing. We’ll need to get everything planted and growing in the garden. I’m hoping we can get some driving in the new car. If I have the funds remaining I’d also like to get another musical instrument to compliment my guitar, so I can enter next winter with more than one type of instrument to practise. But I haven’t decided what that will be yet.