Mini Road Trip in Svealand

You think we would take a break after a ten day trip to Russia, but since we arrived in Stockholm and Emilie has a house in Stockholm it was actually more convenient to stay there and recover for a day before heading out to her summer house in Grisslehamn where we had planned to spend a few days for her birthday weekend. Mel met up with us in the evening in Stockholm. Kara, Emilie and I had spent the day sleeping some more and relaxing on her back porch. We had this rental vehicle delivered to Emilie's house and fortunately it was an automatic so I could drive too (helpful as the girls are used to driving on the other side of the road so they were slightly hesitant at first:).

The first few days we toured the lakes and woods around Grisslehamn and had dinner and wine in front of the fire place in the cozy cottage. The next day we walked through some swampy areas and made good use of the wellie boots! It was fun...we ended up being completely silly and goofing around like little girls.


Valborg or the Siste April is the day before May 1st and it is a huge celebration amoung Swedish university students. It usually begins around noon and the students sit in the park and have barbeques and drink beer. The result is a bunch of really drunk uni students around 5 in the afternoon. The shocking thing was that when we arrived around 4 we were walking through the park and there were just huge amounts of rubbish everywhere and there werent just drunk students but also old drunk alumni men (who did not wait for the toilet but chose the nearest tree!). I have not seen anything like it. After finding a nice spot on the hill we joined in the festivites by drinking beer and cider. Above left you can see how I have mastered the act of standing on two beer cans without crushing them :) Uppsala is a nice city but we still all agreed that we like Lund better, the only thing missing in Lund was a river like the one that runs through the center of Uppsala.

This last photo is of the old town in Gävle. It is I think the oldest wooden town center according to the Lonely Planet travel guide. There isn't much to this city but its noteworthy as the Gateway to Norrland and also the northernmost city in Sweden I travelled to.