of Lars J. Nilsson

Celebrate Xenu! If you’re reading this and don’t know who this “Xenu” person is, you can start here. Thet’s right. It’s the space alien L. Ron Hubbard created as the back-story for Scientology. In Birmingham (UK) I was frequently annoyed by Scentology people on the streets, and my favourite answer as I swept pass them quickly became a sneering: “In Xenu I trust!” They quickly stopped bothering me. I wonder why?No more “oh shit, I don’t have a subway map, where the hell am I going!” for me. Here.Streaming philosophy radio on line? Why not? I havn’t had time to check it out properly yest, but it does seem like a cool idea.

The former Poker team from Tain AB on conference in Val Thorens. Brilliant stuff. There can’t be many places in the world were you can take a team of programmers, go to the alps, and expect everyone to be able to ski. But in Sweden and Norway you can. And these guys could ski.Being geeks, we didn’t party as hard as expected on a “skiing-charter-trip”. Instead we had LAN-parties (yes, we brought a wireless router) were we played Command and Conquer and Trackmania. We also played a board game called Robo Rally where you “program” robots to move and act across a board. Great stuff, but our guide hardly believed his eyes when he checked in on us the second night to find a small apartment jam-packed with geeks, two routers and a heap of laptops. He literally stod stunned for a minute and then stuttered “Oh… This is… I’ve never seen anything this gross” (free translation from Swedish).I did bring a camera, but it didn’t like the snow, even when I figured out to use the “snow and beach” setting to compansate for the light. What I took, you will find here. But it is not too hard to spot the Mount-Blanc massive.Viktors pictures are better, and you’ll find them here.

IntroductionWell then, a two day trip to Grövelsjön is on the agenda. The idea was R+V’s although I had talked about getting up in the mountains one more time this year. The plan was to take it easy, stay at Lövåsgårdens Fjällhotell (hotel) the first night and then get out Saturday. Be back at the car Sunday late afternoon again.Here’s some of the equipment I used for this trip:

• Haglöfs “Solid” boots.
• Hilleberg “Akto” 1 pers. tent. New!
• Fjällräven “Råstu” 75L back pack.
• Fjällräven “Siluette M5” sleeping bag.

The exciting thing being the new tent of course. Hilleberg generally makes excellent tent and the Akto is certainly not any exception. Very light, 1.5 kg, and extremely easy to set up and tear down. Absolutely brilliant stuff.Interlude; The HotelSince this was to be an easy trip we, or rather R+V, had decided to stay the the Lövåsgårdens Fjällhotell the first night. No complaints about that decision! Three course dinner with decent wine, nice enough rooms and a feeling of luxury set up a perfect start of the weekend. Most people staying there looked like day trippers, staying the weekend and making short walk on the mountain side during the days…. Which looked, having been there, as a bloody brilliant vacation as well.Day one: Off on the mountain sideAnother brilliant part of staying at a hotel the night before going out is of course… breakfast!! This wasn’t exactly a Hilton international, but before going out to live on hard bread and soups for two days it was magnificent.The hotel is situated right on the side of the kalfjäll (above mountain tree limit). We set out almost straight north, following the track up passing between western and eastern Barfredågna targeting the small hut Oscarsstugan, where we stopped for coffee.Out original plan was to try Storvätteshågna (1204 m) the first day but we’d been tipped off at the hotel that maybe the weather would be better the next day. The Saturday was slightly overcast and quite windy. So instead we continued straight north on an unmarked track between Storvätteshågna and Fosksjökläpparna, aiming for the north side of Storvätteshågna for the night. We passed the plateau north of Övre Fosksjön on the marked summer track after lunch. before this we had seen the occasional day tripper aiming for Storvätteshågna from Grövelsjön but from this point onward we didn’t see anyone until returning the next day.We stopped early afternoon just below the tree limit north north-west of Nedersthån north of Storvätteshågna. Where R proceeded to magic up a small bottle of wine and some parmegiano cheese for the ready made pasta carbonara. Lovely stuff!(And yes, I did have some whisky with me as well. A half litre 12 YO MacAllan in a plastic bottle. Really? Did you think I would not have?)At the evening the sun emerged. R relaxed, V picked a litre of blue berries in no time – the north side of Storvätteshågna was filled with them! – and I took a small walk down to the first lake on the border of Töfingdalens Nationalpark (töfingdalens wild life preserve) before sitting around a small fire, sipping MacAllan and eating blue berries. Neat? You bet!Day two; Up and up we goWe went straight up on Storvätteshågna following the marked summer track. It could have been worse, but starting your day with 400 meters height difference on 2 km walking (gaining 2 meters for every 10 you walk) will wake you up nicely. However, we weren’t in any hurry and did stop to admire the view occasionally.The day was semi overcast but not as windy as the Saturday. And when we reached the top the clouds broke and we had blue skies and sunshine! Beautiful does really cover it. We sat with our lunch at the top of Storvätteshågna for an hour just baking in the sun and generally feeling great.From there on it was easy walking south back to Lövåsen. Although we almost took a wrong turn, where the summer track turns slightly south east towards Lillvätteshågna we almost managed to turn south west instead… Brilliant. R and me was completely out in the blue but thanks to V we figured it out.The end words; The motorway inspectionIf there’s one think you can count on, it is that if you car is going to break down, it is going to do so in the middle of the night after two days of trekking, and is going to do so in the middle of the motorway… But fortunately it was just outside Enköping (close to Stockholm) and also fortunately, I hear from R+V that it wasn’t very hard to fix nor very expensive. Annoying though? A bit.But ignoring the car accident: ‘Twas a lovely weekend!Update 20061004:I finally got my thumb working again. We know have pretty pictures!

Ok, so the posting frequency havn’t been astounding has it?Well I… Erhm, that is to say… Screw it, I’m off trekking.Tomorrow me and R+V will go to Grövelsjön for two days of trekking. I promise a report when I get back. Also an explanation of why the Swedish mountains are so amazingly cool. And pretty pictures! But no kittens! Hurray!