Cross-Border Shopping in Sweden

 Norway is known for its high cost of living, with most items (food, rent, etc.) costing 2-3 times as much as in the United States (http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_result.jsp?country1=Norway&country2=United+States). We certainly experienced this, paying ~$5 per diet Coke (even at gas stations and convenience stores) and paying $50 for a pizza in Oslo. When we crossed into Sweden yesterday, we were surprised to see a huge shopping center in our small destination town of Tocksfors, 4-5 miles from the border. A little investigation provided the answer: Norwegians shop in droves at Swedish border towns, such as Tocksfors, to take advantage of the far lower prices in Sweden. One survey found that 40% of Norwegians have gone to shop in Sweden over the past three months.

When we go on our annual bike trips, we plan things well in advance. We reserve all hotels ahead of time, since the last thing we want to do after a long day cycling is to spend time and energy hunting for a hotel. We also map out each day's bike route before the trip begins, down to the individual roads that we'll be riding on. We do the mapping on our computer and transfer the routes to our handlebar GPS units. We've learned, however, that we have to be flexible, since we sometimes find that roads we had planned to take are not well-suited to cycling (or, in some cases, forbid bicycles altogether). That situation just happened to us. Our preplanned bike routes for Tuesday and Wednesday had us riding  mainly on Route E18, a major Swedish east-west highway. Based on our prior experience cycling in northern Europe, we expected that E18 would have wide shoulders or an adjacent bike path, either of which would have been acceptable for biking. However, we learned yesterday that E18 is at best unpleasant, and at worst unsafe, for cycling, since it has little or no shoulder, no adjacent bike path, and very heavy traffic (including plenty of trucks). So we spent last night investigating alternate roads, as well as train and bus schedules, and re-arranged our plans accordingly. As a result, today's trip from Tocksfors to Karlstad was a delightful 57-mile mile ride through farmland to the town of Arvika, followed by a train ride from Arvika to Karlstad.

Pictures from our ride today