Life In The Fast Lane
Orebro - 23rd June
We are staying tonight in Mikael a suburb of Orebro, which is a large busy city with a culturally diverse population. Everything moves fast, the traffic, the shoppers, the talkers (not in English) and the wildlife. We came to Orebro on a mixture of country roads and highways and experienced so many near misses from speeding cars and dodgy overtaking. The traffic is horrendous because you have big trucks moving freight between countries, there is school holiday traffic and I’m assuming because Sweden has cheap fuel and not as many governments controls as Norway everyone drives flat out to nowhere. Actually misstatement the traffic is going somewhere they went to Lidkoping and so did we.
Our first stop this morning was Lidkoping for a bite to eat and some geocaching. It took 3 attempts to find the town because the GPS thought we wanted to go on one lane country roads to someone’s farm called Lidkoping, and then got confused where the town centre was. Lidkoping has a massive lake, like the rest of Sweden, and because it is school holidays it has very large overflowing campgrounds. Summer school holidays in Sweden vary by region; Stockholm’s start mid June and end late August, and they get 2 weeks at Christmas, and 1 week 3 other times of the year.
Unlike Norway, Sweden happily trades on a Sunday so there were plenty of supermarkets and cafes open for us to get something different to try. Today’s food experience was a bread pretzel covered in apricot jam, icing and hazelnuts. The water feature was near the café, you wind the handle very fast and it spins a propeller which makes a whirlpool, small things amuse small minds.
This is one perspective of the large lake, a geocacher near the lake and a geocache. What do they have in common? Mosquitoes. After saying on the 21st of May that I won’t be geocaching in Sweden again especially in the woods or near water, I soon forgot after a month in Norway and chose forests caches to do. The first one required guessing a code but my patience was lost when I was attacked by mosquitoes and frightened by rodents and squirrels running around me and up and down trees. The second cache was in a swamp and bravely Roger went in and found the destroyed cache, while I screamed at mossies, ants and frogs.
After another hour on the fast paced motorway we got off for a rest at Finnerodja, a small village that just happened to have a nice church and a very popular geocache at a nearby historic village (Strawberry Valley) maintained by the local heritage society. They run a cafe, craft shops and a second-hand/antiques store, no credit cards, ever the toilet needs a bank transfer payment. For the geocache you collect a map and go around the museum buildings and collect clues, of course we have perfect Swedish to do this, actually some kind person must have known we were coming and wrote it all in English. Once you have all the clues you go into the sheep padlock, no MAF we never went on a farm, and you search for a code locked container using a pirate’s map (X marks the spot) and hope you have the number right code gathered from the village clues. The perfect puzzle cache for the school holidays, the kids are entertained for free, they learn something about the old days and get sheep shit on their feet, but no, the little Swedes are in Lidkoping playing on their devices in the caravan. There was just us, one family and two other couples of which one turned up in his A-Tractor, you are never too old to be cool.
