Road trip up North

From Road trip up ...

From Road trip up ...

And so it was that, tiring once more of Västerås, and wishing to see the real Swedish Winter, 5 of us happy go-lucky native English speakers did decide to hire a car, rent a cabin and go 8 hours up North to Umeå in Norrland. Many potential activities were on the agenda - dog sledding, elk-spotting, general snow-related fun...but we'll get to that later.

Last Friday, on the first day of December, we picked up the car from a rental service in Västerås went food shopping and began the 8 hour trek up north. With only a few stops along the way, but many wrong turns and confusion (Swedish signposting is weird), we eventually made it to our cabin just outside of Vännäs at about 10PM. The cabin was great, nice and homely, inside shower and toilet, kitchen....oooo. By this point we were pretty starving, not having eaten much on the way up, so we promptly demolished half our supplies for the weekend. We then had quite a quiet, chilled-out evening eating Smores (an American thing - melted marshmallow and chocolate between two crackers, or in this case, Swedish Pepparkakor) and watching DVDs. Cabin life is fun :)

Saturday morning we got up reasonably early and made our way into the centre of Umeå to pop into the tourist information and see what we could do. This is where things started to go wrong - Umeå tourist info is shut at weekends. Being in Sweden, we should have expected something stupid like this, but I mean really, when do they expect people with jobs/study etc during the week to visit? This, coupled with the lack of snow, scuppered our plans for dog-sledding somewhat, so we had to go off on our own bat. We drove around a bit and followed roadsigns for points of interest to tourists, but these pretty much turned out to be anti-climaxes too; the sculpture park, for example, was in fact an industrial park with about 3 sculptures in it. It did, however, boast a tower with an iron horse at the top....no, I don't know why either. After this we drave 30km to the elk farm, only to be told it was booked up for a business all day, but we could come back in summer...great. At least we weren't exactly busy with other things!

By this point (about half 2 in the afternoon) it was pretty much dark, so we decided to head back to the cabin. The night then consisted of drinking glögg (Swedish mulled wine), playing cards, watching films and eating macaroni cheese :) Not much, but the company was good, and it was nice to be somewhere different and see more of Sweden.

From Road trip up ...

After leaving the cabin on Sunday we began the long drive home, stopping on the way in Sundsvall, a lovely little town/city with plenty of life and Christmasness (yes, it is a word). Christmas market, little snowboarding event, general nice atmosphere. Good to see things starting to feel warm and wintry in Sweden, the atmosphere's good :) Thanks to Zach for doing all the driving, and to Danielle and Jane for organising the whole thing!