20230622 Maridalsvannet and the drive to Sweden

Our plan for the drive to Sweden depended on borrowing Grandpa's car but it was in the shop with some unknown problem. Ja said people don't work on their vehicles themselves, it was considered low class. If the car was available we would pick up the kid from barnehage (daycare) and drive to Sweden that evening. This left the morning free for us to explore the city again.

Sine was able to borrow Grandma's single speed bike and Grandpa's tall mountain bike. With this new freedom we debated whether to bike down to the water again but it was still cool in the morning so we decided instead to go up to the lake above the city.

We had a bad start. Amanda's bike was so small she could barely ride it and my bike was so tall I couldn't reach the pedals. We went down the street and then turned back to try to find some tools to adjust the seats but there wasn't much in the tool shed. I jury rigged an allen wrench with a socket and a clamp to turn it and Amanda struggled with the tilt and height of her seat, pulling everything apart to try to get it put together again in an acceptable orientation. She put two crescent wrenches in her backpack in case she had to adjust things on the road.

We set out at a slow pace, occasionally walking our bikes up the hill towards the reservoir. Along the way we stopped at a Rema 1000 (pronounced rematousand) to buy sunscreen. We went much farther than we'd planned, nearly twenty miles.

The roads were mostly empty and the cars drove slow so it wasn't much of a problem that the bike lane vanished as we headed out into the country. We stopped along the way to look for birds in a beaver dam swamp and visited a ruined church along the road.

When we finally arrived at the reservoir I was disappointed to see it was surrounded by no swimming signs because it was the source of the city's water supply. We stopped and locked our bikes to try to find the overgrown hiking trail loop. Amanda went back and forth looking at ducks and when I thought we were ready to walk I started out only to find she'd gotten distracted again and was nowhere to be seen. Since the hike was only a small loop I figured she'd set out in the opposite direction and I'd run into her sooner or later (also our bikes were locked together and I had the key so she couldn't get away).

I walked through the tall grass until I found the trail that went around the little peninsula. A little way into the trees I came across a huge five foot tall ant hill beside the trail. It was built with a heap of pine needles and swarming with ants. I would have taken more pictures but the ground was boiling with them and they were using the trails to get around.

It was quiet by the lake and many of the trees had beaver gnaw marks. I eventually met up with Amanda and we turned back and continued around the point, dashing past the ant hill again.

Since we were already at the northernmost tip of the lake we decided to continue around it headed down the road, following using our phones to track our progress. At one point we heard a strange whistling sound and the power lines up ahead jumped as a whirlwind swept over the road towards us. It's sudden appearance on this calm day was strange, like we were being visited by a wild animal.

We followed our phones up the road for a ways before we realized we'd gone too far and had to turn back. Amanda's bike seat and petals were situated at such an awkward angle she had to jump off her bike and push it whenever we reached any uphill slope. We rolled back down the main road and turned off onto a road marked 'private' which, when we passed it on the way up, looked like a driveway but turned out to be the actual path around the lake. It was hot and slow up the hill but the trees and fields were pretty. Amanda said she was pretty sure she had a cold.

On the way down the hill we stopped at a french bakery for sandwiches (they had the most delicious bread) and then to the Joker corner store to look for throat lozenges and licorice. I bought a bag of licorice boats that dissolved in your mouth into little strands like spaghetti.

Back at the house Amanda laid down and Ja and I biked to a nearby pharmacy to buy some lidocane lozenges then we biked to the barnehage to pick up Lukas and make sandwiches for our drive to Sweden.

It was Lukas' first extended period away from Sine and he didn't realize what was happening as Sine loaded him into the car seat.

On the drive Ja pointed out the highway billboards and mentioned that Swedish was mostly the same as Norwegian but with slightly different spelling and Danish was the same. A native Norwegian speaker can communicate with a Swede and Dane and could puzzle out the meaning of text but would have difficulty writing in the other language.

As we drove he pointed out that Norway was very strict about speeding. There were clearly labelled camera traps all along the highway but one way they got people to slow down was to set the speedometers in the cars to show a speed 10% faster than the speed you were actually going.

We were going to Strömstad, the nearest large city across the boarder from Norway, two hours away. Because taxes were much higher in Norway and Sweden was economically closer to the EU, food and luxuries like candy, cigarettes, and liquor were cheaper across the border and it was common for Norwegians to make grocery runs across the boarder like a Californian driving to Nevada to buy fireworks. Ja said Grandpa liked to make this trip and that his basement was full of Swedish beer.

We also heard a lot about Harry culture. This term was used to describe the culture of lower class young men known for driving fast cars and playing loud music as they cruised the streets of Strömstad. As we pulled into the coastal neighborhood we were immediately introduced to Harry culture when we were passed by a group of motorcycle punks doing wheelies on the road.

It was midsommer, the longest day of the year, and there were women walking around wearing long dresses and flower garlands. The local park had a maypole decked out in flowers and there was a party going on in the neighboring house with people singing and drinking.

We were here to stay with Ja's friend Kari and her partner Sigurd. They had a house in a nice neighborhood close to the bay and the large EU supermarkets. Upon arriving we were amazed by the robot lawnmower, purchased, Sigurd said, during covid when the borders were closed and the grass was getting out of control. Kari cut out paper eyes to tape to the top of the little machine and I watched it run out of charge and find it's way back to the charging station. It started by going in a straight line towards the station which was around the corner of the house, then it stopped and turned, drove into the wire about 5 feet away from the charging station, stopped, turned and drove directly to the charger. As an embedded engineer I'm super curious about how the software worked and what signal it was picking up from the wire buried around the edge of the yard.

We toured the house, taking pictures of all the novelties and the steep stairs down into the basement where the concrete walls were painted white. The downstairs bathroom had a hole in the wall where a radiator had been removed directly across from the toilet and for privacy they covered this with a little flap.

That evening in the shower I found an engorged tick in my armpit, picked up no doubt, from our hike around Maridalsvannet.

We drank beers (more pilsner) and ate cucumber and cheese, and honey and peanut butter sandwiches. At one point we had to rescue the mower from the corner of the yard where the grass had grown high and Sigurd had to get his trowel out to repair a break in the wire under the hedge.