Cathy's Adventures: Camping and Canoeing in Sweden (1)

Although Denmark has some rather luxurious holiday time compared to the US, it takes a while to get into the system and get that sweet holiday time. As far as I understand it the process goes like this. The holiday time I have this year (2010) is based on the months I worked and thus the holiday time accrued from last year (2009). I could begin using this holiday time from May this year (2010). Sooo since Morten and I only worked part of the year last year our paid holiday is nothing like the 5 weeks plus one week of 1 day non-consecutive paid days off. Mine is more like 10 days this year. But thats ok.

Given the amount of overtime I put in on PhD courses and my first round of field work for my pilot study in Denmark in June, I had some hours racked up. So Morten and I took a 4 day trip to the middle of Sweden, to a lake area close to the border with Norway. Thankfully, Morten's parents were kind enough to let us borrow the car and take it out of the country for the trip. If they hadn't the travel time would have looked something like this with public transit: bus leaving Copenhagen 9 pm, arrive in Goteborg 2 am, wait for the first train to Saffle at 6 am, then get a bus to Arjaeng, then figure out how to get the 10 km from Arjaeng to the Canoe rental place. Sooo...as you can see the car made a big difference in us being able to take this trip.

The first night we camped outside a city about 100 km south of Goteborg. Morten was the planner/tour guide for this trip - which was my birthday present from him...so I left it all up to him. I would say on the whole he did a fantastic job...the one thing that was a bit problematic was finding a place to camp the first night. In much of Scandinavia there is a thing called every man's right. This means that you can camp in most places for free for at least one night, in Sweden and Norway anyway, although its a little more strict in Denmark. After driving around the outskirts of a small city we finally settled in just in time for the mosquitos to come out in droves and make putting up the tent a real good time...

Once navigating through the mess that is Goteborg and the lack of good signs due to the mass of construction going on there we were thought the longest part of the drive was done...little did we know about the 40 km of on and off construction work between Goteborg and Trollhatten. Trollhatten was an experience though as it is a car city, like the Detroit of Sweden. So we saw exits from the main road to Saab Volvo Center and advertising for the Saab Festival (its in August, don't worry you haven't missed it yet!).

It was a lovely afternoon when we arrived to pick up the canoe we rented and get on our way, to where? Well we really had no idea, but it all worked out. This is not a pic of us, but gives you a sense of the calmness of the water and the nice weather on day one.

We found a good place to stop and set up the tent for the night, the sky was clear and it was so warm we didn't even have to put the outside shelter layer on.