Swedish Churches

Many towns that we travel through have churches, mainly Lutheran, that are typically no-frills white structures. These reflect a 1000-year history of Christianity in the country, though religion now plays a minor role in Swedish life. Christianity supplanted paganism as the main religion in Sweden in the 11th century, and the country has been largely Lutheran since the 16th century. From the 1530's until 2000, the Lutheran Church of Sweden was the state church. Sweden is now one of the least religious countries in the world: in a 2009 Gallup poll, 16.5% answered "yes" to the question "Is religion an important part of your daily life?; only Estonia, at 16%, was lower (the figure in the United States, by comparison, was 65%). Only 2% of Swedes are regular church attendees (compared to 40% in the US), and only 18% believe there is a god (compared to over 90% in the US).

There are approximately 500,000 Muslims (5% of the population), making Islam the second largest religious group in Sweden. Approximately 2% of the country is Roman Catholic, and the Jewish population is very small at approximately 20,000.

After a 57-mile ride today, we're now in Eskilstuna, Sweden's 15th largest city with a population of 65,000.

A sampling of churches from our travels in Sweden

More sights from our ride today

Dinner outdoors in Eskilstuna

English as a Second Language in Scandinavia

Europeans, other than the British, commonly speak more than one language, and English is the most common second or foreign language spoken. The highest rates of English speaking outside of Britain or Ireland are in the Scandinavian countries (other than Finland) and the Netherlands, where approximately 85-90% of the people can speak English. [A joke sometimes told in Europe is: What do you call a European who speaks 3 languages?: trilingual; 2 languages: bilingual; 1 language: British.] A Norwegian explained to us that English is so commonly spoken there both because they learn it in school and because there are too few Norwegians (~ 5 million) for it to make economic sense to dub movies in Norwegian, so they watch movies (and often TV) in English. This makes travel very easy for both of us, since we are both essentially unilingual [even Peter, who, despite growing up in Montreal, never spoke French outside of French class at school].

It's been very hard for us to find "local" cuisine during our travels. We find lots of restaurants that serve pizza and kebabs, and outside of the large cities we almost never find any other options. Even in the big cities, it's far easier to find sushi, Chinese, or Indian food than anything that might be considered "local". So lunch on our travels today was a pleasant exception, when we stumbled on a small roadside restaurant in the hinterlands that served Swedish food, and we dined on the daily special of Swedish meatballs.

Today's destination town is Orebro, the sixth largest city in Sweden with a population of 107,000. After hunting for a restaurant here, we ended up dining at an upscale ribs and Tapas restaurant. Nothing "local" was to be found.

A pretty town on our route today -- Bjorn Borg, the 1970's tennis star, did not live here

A treat for lunch -- Swedish meatballs

A more typical roadside restaurant

Cycling into Orebro

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

A Hilly Ride into Sweden

Oslo sits at sea level, on the shore of the Oslo fjord, and is surrounded by mountains. Because of this, our bike ride out of Oslo today began with a 500 foot climb. The rest of the ride was a series of climbs and descents, making today by far the hilliest day of trip so far. We spent much of the day on quiet, scenic roads, but some of the time we were on busy roads with cars and trucks whizzing by fairly close to us (though the drivers were polite, giving us as much room as possible when passing). At mile 60, we crossed into Sweden, and biked 5 more miles to our hotel in Tocksfors, a town of 1150 inhabitants.

We will be spending the next two weeks in Sweden, biking east to Stockholm and then north to Umea, before crossing by ferry to Finland. Sweden has almost double the population of Norway (9.5 million vs. 5 million) and a significantly lower GDP per capita: ~ $41K for Sweden vs. $60K for Norway (the United States, for comparison, has a GDP per capita of ~ $49K). Once we've been on Sweden a little longer, we'll get a sense of some of the similarities and differences between the two countries.

View from an overlook, as we biked out of Oslo. The large complex in the foreground comprises the "bar code" buildings, which have generated controversy for their style and size that are out of sync with the rest of the city.

Scenes from our ride from Oslo to Sweden

Crossing into Sweden

Biking in Sweden

Oslo

Yesterday (Saturday) began with a delightful breakfast in Horten with Anders Wold, President and CEO of GE Ultrasound. Anders lives in a seaside home on the Oslo Fjord, 30 minutes south of Horten. The conversation combined talk about the current and future state of ultrasound with discussion about the mechanics of our bike trip: how we plan the route, what we carry, what electronics we bring with us, use of dog spray, etc.

The ride from Horten to Oslo was fairly hilly, but the biggest challenge we had was dealing with the annoying bike paths that ran alongside some of our roads. Unlike Denmark, where the bike paths were a pleasure, the ones we encountered yesterday tended to be fine for a while, but then would suddenly veer away from the road and head up an extremely steep slope, leaving us the choice of going up the slope or carrying our bikes over a ditch to get onto the road. We eventually gave up on the paths and stayed on the roads.

Oslo blends the old with the modern in a visually pleasing way. It is a busy, vibrant city, with spacious parks, busy walking streets, and a subway/bus system that seems fairly extensive but was easy for us to master. Today (Saturday) was a non-biking day – not really a rest day, since we toured extensively around the city, much of it by foot. We began by taking the Metro to Frognerseteren, a spot at the top of a mountain overlooking the city of Oslo. We then walked down to Holmenkollen, site of the 120 Olympic ski jump, as well as a 95m ski jump. We climbed partly up the latter, and, though neither of us is risk-averse, the sight of the long, steep structure beside us left us amazed that anyone has the guts to ski down it and then launch themselves into the air. We subsequently visited Frogner Park and its Vigeland sculpture garden, walked by the Royal Palace, and wandered around hunting for a good bakery. Tonight, it's off to see the Opera House and the part of Oslo near the harbor.

With Anders Wold

On the way from Horten to Oslo

Biking into Oslo

Active street scene just outside our hotel in Oslo

Mountaintop restaurant overlooking Oslo

View from partway up a 95 m ski jump -- it's even steeper than it looks in the picture. The city is in the background.

In the Vigeland sculpture garden

As Far North as Anchorage, Heading to Reykjavik

Yesterday (Thursday), neither rain nor two flat tires stopped us from completing the 41 mile ride to Hirtshalls, Denmark, in time to catch a 12:45 pm ferry to Larvik, Norway. We were feeling very comfortable in Denmark, with its fairly flat terrain and bike-friendly drivers, and now will have to deal with the much more mountainous Norwegian landscape and watch out for Norwegian drivers, who seem to be more aggressive towards cyclists. Then there's pickled herring, a Norwegian staple: Peter hates both pickles and herring, and fears that the combination may be life-threatening.

When we checked the map, we were surprised to see how far north our trip takes us. In fact, our starting point of Copenhagen (latitude 55.7 degrees) is as far north of Boston (42.4 degrees) as Boston is from Orlando, Florida. Oslo, where we'll be tomorrow, is at about the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska (both are at 60-61 degrees). The northernmost point of our trip -- Umea, Sweden, where we'll be on June 29 -- is as far north as Reykjavik, Iceland. All of that explains why the temperature has been in the 50's to low 60's during our trip, and why we never see darkness during the hours we're awake.

We met a delightful British cyclist on the three-hour ferry ride yesterday. Jim is a bike mechanic who goes on frequent long bike trips and travels extremely frugally, camping out (he carries a tent and sleeping bag) and cooking all of his meals (he carries a stove). We parted ways at the end of the ferry ride yesterday, but then fortuitously met him on our ride today just after Peter developed bicycle gear trouble. We entered into a barter arrangement with him: we bought him a hot lunch and he dealt with the gear problem.

Today's ride took us to Horten, Norway, where we had a pre-arranged afternoon visit to General Electric Vingmed Ultrasound, one of the major worldwide centers for GE Ultrasound development. We were hosted by the general manager, Dagfinn Saeter, who generously spent several hours with us and took us through various aspects of the center. Oded Peres, Manufacturing Leader, demonstrated how they approach quality assurance on all new ultrasound units prior to delivery to customers and allowed us to observe transducer assembly. Sevald Berg, Program Manager, demonstrated 2D, 3D, 4D, and Doppler capabilities of their latest echocardiography equipment. We were also fortunate to engage in a lengthy interchange with Kjell Kristoffersen, Chief Engineer of GE Global Ultrasound, who heard some of our requests for future innovations in ultrasound.

One of the "joys" of a bike trip: fixing a flat tire in the rain

Two geeks on a boat -- taking the ferry from Denmark to Norway

Biking in the Norwegian countryside

Our part of the barter: Taking Jim to lunch

Jim's part of the barter: working on Peter's bike

Visit to GE Vingmed Ultrasound, with Dagfinn Saeter & Oded Peres

Dinner overlooking the harbor in Horten

Another Life-Saving Device Comes into Play

Today's ride was a very pleasant 57-mile journey through well-kept farms, picturesque rolling hills, and nice small towns. Partway through our ride, while cycling on a quiet road through farmland, two large, mean-looking dogs came dashing towards us, barking viciously. Peter grabbed the pepper spray from the holster on his bike and sprayed the dogs as they closed in, causing them to immediately stop in their tracks and back off. Pretty good marksmanship from a staunch gun-control advocate!

We stopped for our mid-morning break at a marvelous bakery in the small town of Aalestrup (population 2700). The selection of fresh breads and pastries was amazing. Peter, a lover of such food, was in bakery heaven. It made him wonder why small European towns can support excellent bakeries, while such towns in the United States offer little more than Wonder Bread or tasteless imitations of ethnic breads (e.g., bagels or "Italian" bread). Even the larger towns and small cities in the US have only mediocre corporate offerings, such as Dunkin' Donuts, Panera Bread, and the misnamed Au Bon Pain (Au So-So Pain might be more appropriate). Peter suffered through "bakery hell" (and more broadly, food hell) when we biked cross-US in 2013.

We ended our ride today in Aalborg, Denmark's fourth largest city with a population just over 100,000 and a metropolitan area population over 200,000. It's the first place we've been to since Copenhagen that appears to have much of a night life (not that old fogies like us take part).

Tomorrow, we head to Norway.

Quiet road through farmland (except for barking dogs)

Through the woods

One of several nice towns we cycled through

The Gold Bakery -- great spot for our mid-morning stop!

Pepper spray -- provides protection from dogs, especially when riding on isolated farm roads

Ancient building in Aalborg from 1506

Modern night life (despite the rain) in Aalborg)