This is Sweden

Sweden is the best place I’ve been. Hands down the greatest. Leaving it filled us with hope that we will come back eventually. Everyone will give you a smile and greet you cheerfully. Sweden loves nature so much that it wants you to love it also. Most of the lakes have only a few lakes around it which makes them 100 times better.

 Sweden will take any food it can and jam it into a tube. Shrimp, tomatoes, bacon, and anything else they could think of. One of the cool things about the small towns was that when you talk to someone they ask where we are from, thinking we were english. They don’t know what Americans sound like! It was hard even thinking about the fact that people don’t know what we sound like and if you butcher their language they laugh like you’re a puppy that tried to roll over, but only got half way.

 Sweden is where I hope one day to raise a kid and a family, open up a small shop and only have to work till 6 because even the bars in small towns close at 6. Life here is chill and relaxing which is perfect for me. Hope you guys enjoyed my visit to Sweden and excited to read about the rest of Europe.

Stockholm is Seattle's sister.

Thursday was far from the easy day trip we all imagined it would be. the day before, Beau took Chloe, Jon, and I out for one last night to drink together. Thursday was filled with all of us calling each other trying to figure out when we were leaving, who has the boxes for our bikes, finding out that the place we originally thought we were going to get the boxes had them but at a premium price none of us wanted to pay and a lot of panic. Throw on top of that some tears from loved ones and a hangover and you got yourself a pretty rough morning, but we made it on time and with everything we needed. Our flight was Seattle > Iceland > Sweden. We left Seattle around 4:30pm and got to Stockholm around 1:00 pm the next day. When flying over Sweden it looks just like western Washington with evergreen trees all over the place, but its flat.

We were met by Chris' uncle Rob at the airport. Him and his wife are letting us stay at their place for a few days while we get over jet lag and wait out a few days of rain. They cook us food and deal with three grown men napping all over their house pretty well. I've never seen people be so nice to a nephew and strangers. I pretty beat from the plane ride and thought I'd chill around town while Chris and Josh went to Stockholm. After a nap I walked around Kallhall to the local lake and thought about how this is my life for the next three months, Nothing but adventuring and living life at my own pace. As i was walking around the lake though, I noticed that the sun was still pretty high for how late in the day it was.

  So get this, the sun sets here at 10:30pm and raises at 3:30am and never really gets pitch black at this time of year. Yeah, 5 hours of this kinda sort of almost dark is all they get. The next day we all took the train to Stockholm for the evening. The buildings here are tall old and amazing. We have nothing like it in the states. If you head over to the older parts of the town you hit narrow old stone roads with gutters carved into the stone. It was raining pretty hard too, but that wasn't stopping us and or the rest tourist from roaming the streets. We went into an old church that they turned into a museum and stumbled onto a major boat race happening on one of the many waterways that Stockholm is built around. We walked around some more and looking at the menus on the shop windows and found out that it's all pretty expensive here. We decided to pass on eating out in Stockholm and make our way back to Rob's for dinner made by him and his wife. Tomorrow we head out on our bikes for the first time and we are all pretty excited for the journey to really begin and even with Stockholm having some amazing buildings and cool shops, I think the best part of the trip so far has been just walking around Kallhall, spending time with friends and locals not worried about just pleasing another tourist.

    Some weird thing they do with pizza here. Calzone like.

                                                           

ps It's so much like Seattle it rained while we were walking around so my camera stayed in while i took pictures with my phone. Sorry for the bad quality. 

what is bike touring?

"I'm jealous Isaiah gets to go to Europe for three months, but I'm not jealous of his accommodations".

I get a lot of questions about what exactly Josh, Chris and I will be doing over the next 3 months. Bike touring can be anything from paying a touring company to carry all of your gear for you as you ride on a predetermined route and will cost you about $600-$2000. The way we are doing it though is by putting large bags on our bike and filling them with everything we will need to live for three months. Sleeping bags, tents, clothes, and little things we will need here and there. The guys and I will be camping most of the time. Some people hostel and hotel jump but we are roughing it. There also wont always be camping places, and when that happens we will have to stealth camp off where no one will see us. I think its illegal but who knows. The nice and also somewhat common way of free camping is also just walking up to a farm and asking the farmer if you can pitch a tent on his lawn. Kind of nervous about that part. We will shoot for about 60 miles a day, but it can vary. Wind, Weather, hangovers and women can all make our rides a little bit shorter. The good thing about our trip is that its for three months, which gives us a lot of freedom for our rides. As of right now we have destinations, compasses, and two wheels to take us there, hoping we choose the right routes. I've never been on a bike tour so i cant really tell you what its going to be like or what it will feel like being in a foreign country unable to communicate with everyone we come in contact with, but there are plenty of other people who have so here are their videos for your to watch and see what I'll be doing.



Hoopdrivers. A christian group of young men doing a 2 and a half month long tour of europe.

what is bike touring on a deeper level.

So hope that helps some of you understand what I'll be doing for the next 100 days. In 24 hours I'll be on a plane off to Stockholm (i hate planes). Thanks for the read and dont forget to play the game for free booze. Share this on face book and say a date and time in between June 14th and September 17th and if your the closes to our first accident ill send you a bottle of local brew of beer or wine.