FINAL DAYS IN SWEDEN

Our 3 weeks of cycling the length of Sweden has been, aside from the gnats, superb. The camping has been some of the best we've had on this trip, partly because we're allowed to camp anywhere and partly because there are endless established sites with fire pits, picnic tables and beautiful views of the rivers and lakes. It is not necessarily a country with breathtaking vistas but instead is a place of serenity, a calming natural landscape whose deafening stillness makes you feel relaxed and at peace. The riding has not been difficult, only pleasantly challenging but we've begun to see some snow speckled mountains on the horizon and I think Norway is going to be a different story.

There are several things that we've found to be prevalent throughout Sweden and someday when we think back to our time here, in addition to the gnats, mosquitoes and abundant forests, these are the things we'll remember. The Swedes love red, or else it's just the cheapest color of house and vehicle paint available. Nearly every house is dark red and the majority of the cars that pass us on the roads are red as well. Sweden is the land of Volvo's. They are by far the most common make of vehicle throughout this country and a huge percentage of them are, of course, red. We've also seen an abundance of classic American cars, far more than we've seen in any country we've cycled through thus far, quite possibly even more than in the U.S. Me, I don't know a thing about cars and when I'm on my bike view them as nothing more than a speedy distraction to my slow-moving and peaceful world. Mike, on the other hand, enjoys old cars and has one back home, so it's kind of a treat for him to be in a place with so many muscle cars to tell me about and admire. And last but not least, Sweden appears to have an unbelievable love for gummy candies. There is an extensive display and vibrant selection of nearly every gummy candy you can imagine in every single supermarket. It's Mike's dream come true as he loves to snack on them throughout the day and a resupply location is never more than a day away.

Today was our final day in Sweden and one of my favorite things about riding here has been the endless daylight. Even though the summer solstice has come and gone and therefore the hours of daylight in the northern hemisphere are decreasing daily, our days have continued to lengthen as we're moving north faster than the point on the globe that receives 24 hours of sunlight. Though we'll be riding north for a while longer in Norway, I don't think we'll ever actually reach the point where the sun never drops below the horizon, which would be a pretty cool thing to see.

Many people have asked us if the endless light has messed up our schedule or made it difficult to sleep and the answer is no, not really. It's a little more difficult to get to bed early since the sun is still high in the sky at 9PM and we usually find ourselves putting off dinner until close to 10, but once we get to bed, falling asleep is not an issue at all. It's like taking a nap in the middle of the afternoon. If you're tired, you can sleep. The strangest part, however, is when you wake up in the middle of the night, look at the watch and find that it's as bright outside as an overcast afternoon but it's only 1AM or that the sun is rising giving you the sense that it's time to wake up yet it's only 3AM. It can be a bit confusing during those groggy hours when you're half asleep and half awake but all in all I'm a huge fan of these long, long days.

Yesterday was another big milestone for us. We hit the 12,450.8 mile mark. That number probably doesn't have any significance to most people, but it turns out to be half the circumference of our planet. Suddenly Earth doesn't seem so big...

GNATS FROM HELL

Waiting a few extra days for our water filter has turned out to be a wise choice. Once we got a couple of days north of Gisela's house, the population drastically decreased. No longer are we passing through several towns a day nor are there frequent houses for us to get water as the land has transitioned from agriculture and livestock to largely uninhabited forests in varying stages of growth and destruction for the logging industry, rivers and lakes. Though we've been told on several occasions that all of the lake and river water is safe to drink, we remain a bit skeptical as it's the color of root beer, a light brown where it cascades over the rocks and a deep black anywhere it is more than a couple of feet deep. It's likely just a harmless algae but we feel much better drinking it after it's gone through our filter and we've learned to plan our water stops more than we used to if we want clear water. Though there's rarely restaurants to stop at, our map shows every town with a church and in Sweden, if there's a church there's always a cemetery surrounding it. I've never seen such well manicured cemeteries with fresh flowers on every site, but the good thing for us is that it means there are water spigots as well. They're easy to spot as there are racks of water cans and gardening tools alongside the water, so as of late the majority of our drinking water has come from cemeteries. We figure we'll get to drink enough river water in the weeks to come.

Root Beer River

With the decrease in number of people came an insane increase in the number of gnats. We expected the mosquitoes to be horrible but the gnats have far outdone them and proven to be pure torture, far worse than even the worst tabano incidents in South America, which we thought could never be topped. Our first night in no-man's land taught us just how bad it can be out here. We got to camp, set up our tent and by the time we were ready to make dinner it was virtually impossible to remain outside. We were fully covered in shoes, jeans, rain jackets and hats yet were were being eaten alive. I would have killed to have a bee keeper's suit and a pair of chemistry goggles. We decided to cook dinner inside the tent but with us entered several hundred gnats. It wasn't a very relaxing meal as we had to deal with the biting gnats while trying to cook and eat. By the end of dinner we each had dozens of bites but at least the tent was void of them. We let our food settle for a minute and then realized we had a bit of a problem. The sky outside was gray and swarming with millions of insects but we still had stuff to do out of the tent, like washing the dishes, brushing our teeth, going to the bathroom and putting the rain fly on the tent. It was like we were prisoners in our little mesh bubble, stuck inside a snow globe, only we had flesh biting gnats rather than beautiful white snowflakes swirling around us.

A tiny corner of our tent.

We didn't have much of a choice, we had to get out. It was a 2-man project to exit the tent as fast as possible. One of us had to unzip the door as the other literally dove through the opening and rolled on the ground outside while the first person proceeded to zip the door shut as the second person's feet were leaving the tent. Try doing chores, or better yet going to the bathroom, when you can't stop moving in the spastic movements of a child throwing a tantrum, legs running in place, arms flailing and head shaking side to side, for even an instant without feeling the prick of a bite somewhere on your body. It's impossible. They were so thick that when we slapped at one that had landed on our faces, our hand ended up covered in dozens of tiny black corpses.

As soon as our chores were completed we dove back into the tent only to find that it, too, was swarming with the ruthless devils. Several hours later we had a clean tent and were able to go to sleep, but shortly thereafter I awoke with a dilemma, either lay awake all night having to pee or go out into the torture chamber. In the dusk of midnight it appeared as though they had calmed down a bit so I chose the latter but it turned out to be a big mistake. In the 20 seconds I was outside I got at least a hundred bites and let another 100 gnats into the tent with me. I spent the next hour scratching at my skin uncontrollably like a drug addict coming down from a high while Mike played gnat killer in hopes we might get a few more hours of sleep that night.

It was an unbelievably miserable night and now I understand how Sweden can have the “Every Man's Right” and not worry too much about their land getting trashed. What's the fun of camping when you're confined to a tent? I now look like I have Chicken Pox and we've found ourselves wishing for two things cyclists never want, wind and rain, but we learned a very valuable lesson. The next day we bought a little orange bucket with cute fish on it and made a rule: You get one entrance into the tent every night so once you're in, you're in for good. You can either severely dehydrate yourself every night, lay awake and uncomfortable having to go to the bathroom until morning or swallow your pride and use the bucket.

Mike with our bucket (before it was used).

Close up views of our nicely decorated bucket.

NEW FRIENDS AND OLD

Our past week has been quite lazy. Upon our arrival in Sweden we had only one planned stop in a tiny town near Rejmyre to meet up with Gisela, a woman we met more than 3 months ago in southern Portugal at the very beginning of our European bike tour. For anyone who's been following the blog since then, she was the woman who was living in her camper van and was so kind to us when we set up our tent amongst the camper community she was a part of. We had remained in contact since we left Portugal and thought it would be fun to meet up again while she was parked at her friend Matts' house for several weeks in southern Sweden this summer.

The night before we arrived to Gisela's we met Ben, a French guy on a solo 2 ½ month bike tour who was camping at the same roadside rest stop as we were. Ecstatic to meet some other cyclists and more-or-less heading in the same direction as we were, we invited him to join us the next day for the ride into Rejmyre knowing Gisela wouldn't mind if one more traveler showed up needing a place to sleep for a night.

It was great having Ben along with us, much better than our ride with the last French guy we met in Austria who didn't speak any English, wasn't much of a cyclist and nearly wanted to kill me by the end of the day because I apparently made him ride to fast and too far. Ben on the other hand, spoke perfect English, was a strong rider and provided an additional element to our conversations which was nice. When pretty much the only people Mike and I have spoken to over the past year are each other, conversations can get a little dull at times.

Mike, Ben & Cari

Ben & Mike

Getting to Gisela's friend's house was a little tricky as there are no names for the country roads in Sweden. The only way you know whether or not you're on the correct road is by the signs directing you to the next tiny village up the road. If you don't have an extremely detailed map you'll never find your way through Sweden on anything other than main highways. The pace we were searching for was called Kallstugan, a one-house town out in the forest and our directions were as such, “There is no sign for your turn off the main road but if you get to an old factory you've gone 100 meters too far. Once you get onto the gravel road keep taking all of the left hand turn options and then look for the black garbage can at the end of the driveway and listen for the 4 dogs who never stop barking.” Well, we never found the old factory and didn't want to get ourselves too lost wandering the logging roads of Sweden so we asked people to point us in the right direction once we got to Rejmyre. Once on the correct gravel road, the garbage can was a good indicator of which little side road to take and we were greeted at the gate by 4 barking German Shepherds, a dead giveaway that we had arrived at the right house.

It was a bit crazy to see Gisela again; typically when we meet someone on the road we never expect to see them again. You spend an hour or two, maybe a day or two together and then paths diverge and the chances of them crossing again is fairly minimal. Once again, just as in Portugal, we were treated with Gisela's kindness and generosity. Not only did we get to take hot showers, do our laundry and sleep in a bed, which are such rare luxuries to us, we also had an open invitation to relax and hang out for as long as we needed.

Our cozy little bungalow.

Ben ended up staying 2 nights before he had to take off to make it to Stockholm where he was meeting his girlfriend for a few days. There's a good chance we'll run into Ben again as we're all heading north towards the same destination, the Lofoten Islands. It will be great to have another person with us for a while. We stayed 5 nights at Gisela's which was considerably longer than we'd originally planned to stay but we had had Mike's mom mail our water filter to this house since we'll soon be in no-man's land, drinking from the lakes and rivers and of course it was late in arriving. It wasn't such a horrible thing to have to wait for a package as this was our first long break from cycling since Spain and it felt nice to relax and sleep as much as we pleased knowing that we had absolutely nothing that had to be done each day. We lazed around all day, read a little, played with the dogs, made phone calls and took advantage of having a kitchen for a few days. Not only was it nice to cook for ourselves but we had an appreciative crowd which always makes it that much more fun.

Pila, one of the 4 German Shepherds.

 Gisela, Matts, Ben & Mike

Homemade Strawberry Shortcake

Thanks again, Gisela, for your welcoming arms and caring heart and who knows, maybe our paths will one day cross again.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SWEDEN

First impressions say a lot about people and places and from our first week in Sweden all we have to say are wonderful things. For starters, the people have been outstandingly friendly. Everyone says “hej” (sounds like hi) when we pass them on the streets, any time we stop in a town people come up to us and want to talk about where we're from and where we're going and we have yet to meet someone who doesn't speak at least a little English, most of them being perfectly fluent. For the first time in a long time communication has been easy and I must say it's really, really nice not having to speak in simple, broken phrases and simultaneously use hand gestures.

I've always imagined Sweden, and all of Scandinavia for that matter, to be somewhat like the Midwest in terms of people's kindness towards strangers. So far that premonition has held true. Last Friday was a holiday, The Midsummer Festival where all of Sweden celebrates, kind of like the 4^th of July in the U.S. Technically Summer began only 5 days before that and I hope that this wasn't really the midpoint, which would leave us with only 5 days to go before Fall hits. Of course we didn't know it was a holiday until we arrived in a town to buy our groceries for the day. We stopped at a convenience store only to find it closed. At the same time, a woman drove up, we inquired about a supermarket and she pointed us in the right direction. However, when we arrived, that too had closed early for the day. We proceeded to the other store in town but as you can guess, it was closed. Luckily we had some lunch supplies in our pannier so we sat on a bench outside the market and pulled out our chips, cheese and avocado and began to eat. Just as we took our first bite a car pulled up. It was the same woman we ran into when we first got to town telling us that there was one gas station in town, 400 meters away, that was still open for another 15 minutes. I don't know how she found us tucked under the awning of a closed supermarket and I don't know of too many people who would go out of their way to hunt down two travelers just to inform them of the last place they'd be able to find food for possibly the next two days, but we were happy that this woman had the heart to do it for us on that day so we didn't have to eat only chips for lunch and plain white rice for dinner.

So far bike touring in Sweden has been fantastic. The landscape is very much like northern Minnesota, the Pacific northwest, Canada or Alaska. There are rolling hills of mostly forest though some stretches of farmland and we pass by dozens of lakes daily. We had to buy Mike a fishing pole so he didn't drive himself mad at camp every night and just as it turned out to be a good investment in Chile, it has also proven to be a worthwhile way to spend $30 here too. I get a couple of hours to write, read or work on editing our pictures and Mike gets a couple of hours to fish and drink beer; it works out nicely for both of us.

Mike fishing.

Although we haven't found any long stretches of bike paths, they're not necessary here. Most of the traffic sticks to the main highways which leaves us as the only ones occupying the quiet country roads that connect the tiny rural villages. It is peaceful riding with the only sounds being those of our tires whirring along the pavement, the wind in our ears, birds singing and our squeaky pedals. The land is scattered with little mountain cabins, the majority of them painted dark red with white trim, that beautifully contrast the lush green landscape and wildflowers that surround them. The air is clear and fresh, the kind that's only found in the forested northlands where there are no people and lots of trees. There is a crispness in the air and despite the fact that it's the warmest time of the year there is still smoke billowing from the chimneys that gives the forest the smell of lazy winter days and makes me want to snuggle up in a down blanket with a good book and a cup of hot tea. There is so much wide open space, so few people and such deafening silence that it feels like we have the world to ourselves and I think of how peaceful it would be to live in such a place. I'm sure I'd love it until winter hit (in August) and then I'd be ready to move some place warmer.

A typical looking house.

On top of everything I've already mentioned, there is one more thing that makes Sweden absolutely wonderful for bike touring. They have a law called “Every Man's Right” and what it states is that you are allowed to camp virtually anywhere as long as you're not in someone's yard, in a park where it's posted that camping is prohibited and not disturbing or destroying the natural habitat. For us, there couldn't be a more convenient law. No longer do we have to spend time searching for a place to hide every night. When we're ready to camp, we fill up water and pull over just about anywhere without having to worry about someone seeing us or spotting our campfire and kicking us out in the middle of the night. What a wonderful place this is!

Over the course of our first week in Sweden, we've talked to dozens of people and nearly every one of them has ended our conversation with some form of, “Welcome to Sweden. I hope you enjoy your visit.” What a proud, welcoming and wonderful people we have found in this country and thanks to their kindness, we are certain to enjoy our time here.