Öresund Runt

Last weekend, we set out for another area tour. This time: Around the Sound.

This is a travel voucher from Skånetrafiken that allows a passenger unlimited travel on trains in Sweden and Denmark, and over the Öresund channel that lies between them. We traveled first north from Lund to Helsingborg, one of the larger cities of Sweden.



We wandered about for a little bit and then boarded a ferry connection to the city of Helsingør, Denmark, visible across the sound. It was a whiz-bang ride, only twenty minutes and we were in another country. We managed, in the short crossing, to have a nice café lunch,



and to do a little tax-free shopping (licorice allsorts and some more Gin Long Drink). We disembarked in Helsingør with a few hours to spare to our hostel check-in, so we hoofed it on over to Kronborg, the castle of Denmark's King Frederik II.



The impressive fortress is widely held to be the castle of Shakespeare's Hamlet. We didn't buy any admission tickets and so weren't able to see any interior spaces. We did, however, find the entrance to the casemates unguarded. These are the tunnels underneath the castle. Just before descending into the depths, we saw an empty flashlight automat. Hunh, well... it was dark down there!

We made it back to the station and caught a train to Fredensborg, where we were hostelling for the night. We wandered (appropriately) down the central pedestrian street to our vandrarhem (wander-home = hostel) and were startled by the lack of anything at all going on.



The shops were closed and we were really the only pedestrians. Fredensborg is the summer vacation home of the Danish royal family, and they've got a big palace there, but beyond that, there really wasn't anything to see. Our hostel was nice and we had our own room. The breakfast buffet had chocolate and brie, so we were thrilled, and railed quickly on to Hillerød.

Here, we set up the rest of our Sunday with the purchase of Copenhagen Cards. These were in the same vein as the Tallinn Card from earlier this summer and gave us discounted and free admission to several Denmark attractions. Our first stop was Frederiksborg Slott, really a giant and grand castle.



Check out the album for more luxurious photos!

We finished the day in Copenhagen. And once again it was (and forever will be, as far as we know) raining. We went to some museums, visited sop-soaked Tivoli and had some Japanese girls move out of the way and take our photo with a famous lady of the sea:

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We nodded and dozed on the way home and were relieved when the train pulled into Lund C.

-J.

Ystad Bicycle Champions! (Into the Wind)

Hi! We are two-wheel superstars! We spent the weekend pedaling roughly 40 kilometers over the rolling fields of the kommun. (We'll post a traced routemap with approximated disances soon.) It was a beautiful, sunny, windy weekend for our foray. We bought barn/cyckel (child/bike) tickets for our bikes to ride with us on the pågatåg through Malmö to Ystad.



At the station, we parked and locked our bikes, stored our bags and strolled around the monk-market. It's a yearly street-strolling market-cart affair. Merchants wear monk's robes, and one in ten is selling donuts, the word for which in the Swedish language, munk, is synonymous with monk. We didn't buy any donuts, and made it back to our bikes at around 6:00. We mounted up and rode westward along the coast and a bit north into the country to our hostel in Snårestad.



The hostel was billed as "Like a hotel, but cheaper!". In fact, it was not much like a hotel. It was more like a prison, with echoing halls and thick metal doors. It was okay, and breakfast was pretty good (eggs, sandwiches, muesli, coffee...), but we decided to unbook our second night and seek lodging elsewhere on Saturday. As we were going to ride that day to the historical stone monument Ales Stenar, we booked a room at STF Vandrarhem Backåkra. There's a nice run of designated bike trails through Ystad to Nybro. After that, it became an arduous ride in close traffic on road 9, a major coastal roadway. Around three o'clock, we arrived in Kåseberga at Ales Stenar.



These are supposed to have been erected around 500 AD. Not as old or as big as stonehenge, but with a feeling like that, and quite a view from the south-facing seaside cliffs of Skåne.

We picked up a giant ice cream cone and some smoked fish for dinner at Kåseberga's harbor and made it to our new digs around 5:00. We found ourselves bunked in a separated, curtained alcove in a dorm room. It was neat and clean. We shared the total space with 6 other groups, complete with elephant-walkers and jittery sugar-rush children, but it was no big deal.. and it was cheaper.
That evening, we rode the short couple of kilometers to Löderup's beach. It was chilly enough that we didn't want to swim, but got to wade a little.



The next morning we had a really fabulous breakfast buffet at Jakob's Café, with homemade breads, muesli, soft cheese, and peanut butter (among many other delicious things!). We took the day to visit several other towns dotting the wheatfields of the region.



It was a much nicer ride with hardly any other vehicular traffic. The wind, pretty consistently throughout the day, however, was really quite a...


(speed impediment... heh heh)

We made it back to Ystad sooner than we exected, and were back in Lund in time for dinner. What a weekend! Please be sure to browse the Ystad's Kommun album on Webshots. And catch up with some videos from the trip, too.

-J.