Bike Tour. Day 2.

I decided to keep going. Here’s what I saw between Loshult and Vetlanda.

Everything’s all packed up! On the way out of the forest, I stepped in mud and my entire shoe was covered in mud. If I had SPD pedals and real biking shoes instead of toeclips and straps, I might have been held up some. Not today.

Getting into Älmhult, we see an IKEA distribution warehouse, just like the one right over the Grapevine. Officially in Kronobergs Län (part of Småland), and out of Skåne.

And then, some IKEA corporate buildings. Yes, that’s a gigantic Allen Wrench next to all those flags.

What’s with all the IKEA stuff in this medium-sized town? Could I be close to? What? The worlds’ first IKEA ever? The one I visited on my 21st birthday? This is where it all started for minimally designed, affordable flat-packed furniture?

Alphabet soup must not agree with someone’s stomach here in Älmhult.

This is my breakfast! I bought the almond pastry from a nice bakery; the cute girl working there said she didn’t know what anything in the pastry case was because it was only her third day. She did, however, know that there was no pastries with apple, blasphemers.

Then I picked my bicycle up and holy dove down the road into FUCKIN’ DIO!!!!!!

Hell yes he does! \m/

Here’s a loppis. Loppis is slang for loppmarknad, obviously, you dumbwit. A loppmarknad is obviously a used-item sale, and descibes anything from thrift stores, to yard sales, to businesses like this one pictured that have permanent yard sales just like the crackheads that used to live up the street from me, to dimly-lit rooms with 3 tables of sour-faced 90-year-old women selling crappy tea sets for way too much money, to gigantic swap meets. Obviously.

This is a total field south of Alvesta.

I stopped in Alvesta for a hawaiian ‘za. It was one greasy pie! I didn’t really care too much for this town, gotta say. They did have the first of many runestones to be seen (I ended up seeing so many I stopped looking, so there will be no more pictures of runestones AFTER THIS ONE).

This is me posing by the Helgasjön.

Here’s a church after a grueling set of crazy-hills northeast of Åby (seriously a nice little town, looked like a Norman Rockefeller painting with streams and trees and grass and canoes everywhere). Being that there are about 5039 little towns named Åby in Sweden, the one I’m talking about is in the Växjö Kommun. Just to clarify.

Here’s a lake. Sorry bro, no time to swim now!

The road here was pretty boring – it looked like this for about 30 miles. I saw maybe 2 cars the whole time…

I found a place to stay, about ten minutes outside Vetlanda in Myresjö. I don’t know why, but since the campsite was near where the road was just beginning to get busy, I kept passing the spot I wanted and backtracking when traffic lightened up, as if pulling over and setting up a clandestine tent was illegal in Sweden. Maybe I just didn’t want any hicks finding me and bashing my head in in the middle of the night, Easy Rider style.

I realized after setting up the tent that I could have done at least another hour of biking. The sun was still out, but twilight is rediculous here and lasts forever. Oh well, this was a good spot, and you never know if down the road, there will be no more forest to camp in (yeah, right).

By the way, it was today that I realized that when my cell phone turns off, it needs a PIN code to turn back on! I sure as hell didn’t have the PIN code, so now I don’t have a working phone OR access to any of my phone numbers. So my roomate will probably think I’m dead. Oh well (it turned out to not be a problem)!