After breakfast and tidying up our spot, like turning the bed back into a sofa and cleaning the place, we were set for a shorter trip to Åsarp. 40 kilometers and 200 climbing meters away from here.
Before we got back to the road, we had to go through some woods and a garden belonging to a hopefully friendly Swede.
Vi gick vilse i skogen,
Jan Mennens
vilse i skogen,
inte mycket plats för cykling,
vi gjorde det bara till fots.
Back on the road, we passed a neolithic graveyard Ekornavallen. The first farmers settled on the Falbygden over 5,000 years ago. They worked the land, kept grazing cattle, hunted, fished and gathered berries and nuts. Agriculture became more important and much land was mined.
Ekornavallen was exclusively a burial ground until the end of the Stone Age. Very little is known about the sacrifices and ceremonies performed during funerals there. The oldest tomb type on Ekornavallen is a corridor tomb, and there are four such tombs in the area.
These tombs were often family graves, containing the bones of many individuals.
And to show that not much has changed in all these centuries, the rich and the powerful always got the better places and the nicer tombs.
The poorer folks only got one stone. These stones were put there during the Iron Age (500 BC to 1000 AD) to mark tombs.
When we biked a bit further, we also encountered a runestone, which is often used to commemorate an important person.
This rune stone was first mentioned way back in 1287, in a letter from King Magnus Ladulås, making it the oldest written record of a rune stone. It also served as a boundary marker between the Gudhem monastery and Håkantorp properties.
Okay, enough history for the day, we need to move forward.
We ate our lunch on a football field along the way. In that case, we had some grass to lie our tired bodies on 😁.
Next stop was Falköping, to buy electrolytes and muscle ointment at the pharmacy, and dinner for tonight at a Maxi ICA. Falköping is a very nice city, definitely worthwhile a visit if you should be in the neighborhood.
The last part of our route was on an old railway that got turned into a bike lane.
Along this way we found this intriguing sign:
We didn’t recognize those names as Swedish provinces, so Leen looked it up and apparently three smaller provinces got merged into bigger ones, and these two became part of the bigger Västra Göta län.
At 16:50 we arrived at the house we rented for the coming three days. Time for some rest again, and hopefully some time for drawing or painting.
By the way
Today we passed our 2500 kilometers milestone.
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