Sweden – the beginning

## Disclaimer: the following are a personal account of events and a moderated version of the original that was published on uberdentraum.blogspot.com. This does not necessarily depict the opinion of other members or the whole group. ##

A Road Trip to the North. That’s what it was. All the way through Sweden and Norway. And before we start describing the experiences of both countries, a set of keywords to get an idea:

midnight City Rally, mosquito attacks, goats as camping crashers,goats as road blockers, tetris, midnight sun, “all day, all day”, campfire, surprise cabin, seagulls, arctic circle, fjords, trolls, alternative IE, middle of nowhere, knäckebröd!

We actually spent only a few days in Sweden in the beginning of the trip – 5 and a half. The reason for this: smaller distance, and much faster transport from one point to another – in Sweden they do have normal highways!

Day 1 of traveling started smoothly: after packing all our stuff in 2 station wagons and a mini-van we were ready to leave Gothenburg for our first destination: Stockholm. We had some stops in between, to the Läckö and Örebro castles and some random camping place for lunch. We had energy at the time, so we spent most of our time in the cars watching the nature around us. And we were lucky that the weather was very good – sunny and warm. Also with some white fluffy clouds here and there, but not enough to hide the ever glowing sun.

We arrived quite late that night in Stockholm (something that proved to become a habit in the rest of the trip) and after an awesome dinner provided and cooked by LBG Stockholm, we decided that staying in was not an option. It was City Rally time! We begun after 12am (that’s were the word midnight goes) and it was quite dark, but that didn’t stop us from having fun. It hindered our view of the city, but with an awesome tour guide and great company, how can one complain?

After visiting the city’s most notable landmarks and hearing interesting stories about them (also visiting the Blood square and dancing a Swedish midsummer dance!) we ended up in a local pub, improvising rules for a quick pub crawling ‘session’. We eventually returned to our hosts around 3-4am and found out that it’s possible in one apartment to host more than 10 people at the same time. ^^

Day 2 was Uppsalalalala day: After waking up and having breakfast we started driving towards Uppsala, where we had a small walk in the city center and the chance to exchange money. Those with euros were not that lucky: bad exchange rates and high exchange fees.

Our next stop was the Örbyhus Castle, where we had our first mosquito attack and a quick walk around the place, which was totally magnificent. The only thing missing was horse riding.

Sweden is totally the land of mosquitos!

The same day we came across a stunning site, and we just had to stop for pictures. We are a group of photographers you see, so we can’t help ourselves, sometimes.

Later we had our first camping in tents near a lake, that featured almost in the center of it, a small island with a red hut. Dreamy place.