grown without schooling: Inlandsbanan

August 20th, 14:30

I'm finally out of Lapland! I've moved all the way south to the "Northern Sweden" section of my guide book! Tropical paradise, here we come!

Visa Inlandsbanan på en större karta

The landscape has changed quite a bit since I left Storumen. I even saw my first farm! (but I haven't seen any since). Instead of just birch trees like in Abisko, or a birch-spruce forest like in Storumen, I'm now seeing pine, aspen, and even a few oaks (that's my train's-eye-view assessment). And there is lupine all along the side of the track. This ride along the Inlandsbanan isn't quite as lively as the one yesterday. There are only about 5 other people on the train, and the sound system (as well as the heat for that matter) isn't working so the hostess can't tell us interesting facts along the way. But it is very relaxing and I did see a moose! And I'm starting to see more and more houses and settlements popping up. Lapland was so sparsely populated. The houses were all at least an hour apart, and you never saw any signs of human life between them. Now there will be the odd house here and there, or a woodlot, or something associated with the railroad. But it's still not much.

We just passed a village named after a monk who was coming up from Stockholm to warn the villagers about the black death, but he drowned in a lake right outside of town and never got to tell them. The entire village died. That's not the kind of reason I'd like a village named after me.

I'm on my way now to Östersund, population 60,000. That's going to be quite a culture shock since the biggest place I've been since leaving Stockholm has been 20,000. This is the end of the northern section of the Inlandsbanan and the southern section starts in the morning, so I had no choice but to stay over the night there. I was going to try camping there, since that's what I've been doing up until now to save money, but we don't get in until 9:00 pm, it's raining, it was pretty cold the last time I got out of the train (and it's pretty cold in here), I haven't slept in a bed for over 2 weeks (if you don't count sleeping on the daybed in the toy room at the mountain lodge), my tent still smells like cat pee, and I think it's going to be pretty hard to find a place to camp in a city of 60,000. And they're supposed to be a sea monster living in the lake, so I don't want to put my tent to close to there. So I think I'm going to try and find a place to stay. At nine o'clock on a Friday night in the summer...

August 21, 7:30

Total sucess on the hotel! I went to the top rated hotel according to lonely planet (Hoetell Emma). It was rainning hard when I got there, and the only hostel options (which didn't sound that great) were really far away from the train station. And the train was leaving at 6:50 in the morning. So I though, if I'm going to stay in a hotel, why not spend a tiny bit more and stay in the nicest one? Sweden has discounted rooms at most hotels in the summer time and on weekends (which seems very odd, but good for me) so I was able to get a room for less than $100. Which seems like a lot, but when you think I would spend $80 to stay in a Econo Lodge off interstate 70 in Missouri, this was a terrific deal.

The cold, wet street

Hotell Emma. Above a whiskey room! (But I didn't go down there)

Staying in a hotel has such a different feel to it than staying in a hostel. In a hostel it's like you're just paying them to use their services. In a hotel it's like you're paying them to serve YOU (expect for the hostel Pinky and I stayed at in Olomouc in the Czech Republic where Eloise did our laundry for us). And Hotell Emma was so nice! When I was checking in the receptionist asked what time I would be leaving in the morning. When I told her 6:30, she said, "Oh dear. You are going to miss breakfast. Maybe I could pack you a breakfast and give it to you tonight so you can take it with you in the morning?" Definitely not an EconoLodge.

I took a hot shower (which as you could see I really needed), tried to watch my first Swedish TV but couldn't figure out the remote (expect that the button labeled "Magic" didn't do what I hoped it would), and slept in a super comfy, high tread count bed. The city was really nice too. I would have liked to have more time to explore.