The most glaring gap in my planning had been figuring out how to get from Korrö to Malung. I tried blithely assuming I could work it out by finding a ride, but none of my vague leads panned out, the ride board on FB had no solutions for me (though it did get me to the festival), and there was no venue for that sort of connection on-site. My backup plan was to head all the way back into Stockholm, where I had managed to round up a couple offers of crash space, but that’s a lot of extra travel time and I hadn’t figured out how to get to Stockholm, or even to the nearest train station.
I had nearly despaired of a solution — in fact, it was a few minutes before midnight on the final night of the festival, and nearly time to meet up with my ride home — when I chanced across my friend Olle. Nope, Olle hadn’t been there the whole time, just arrived this morning. Oh, a ride to Malung? Surely one of these nice people right here can help you. Hey, Thomas, you’re going to the courses at Malung next, week, aren’t you? No? Hey, Anders, you’re driving north, at least, yes? See, there you go, he can get you as far as Avesta, that gets you to Dalarna instead of taking the train all the way back in to Stockholm. Y’all can work it out from here. Ta dah!
Anders kindly swung a little out of his way to pick me up at Eva & Bengt’s house in the morning (joining us for a few tunes) and gave me a lift all the way to Avesta, dropping me off at a lovely quiet hostel. Ursula (my bear) and I were nearly the only inhabitants: I think there was one other guy in the building somewhere. I borrowed one of the hostel’s bikes and rode into town to get my next couple of train tickets (US visa cards don’t work on the SJ website) and buy some groceries. Glad of an evening of down-time to work on logistics and catch up a little.
The hostel owner had promised it would be easy to get to the train station on the local bus (a condition of my choosing to stay at that hostel). That turned out not to be correct — you need to have the unobtainable-by-foreigners transit card already in hand and request ahead of time online that the bus stop for you — so I didn’t feel guilty about taking him up on the offer of a ride the next morning.
Love your travel log with pics! I travelled as a tourist through Denmark-Sweden-Norway 20 years ago for three weeks with backpack and by myself at hostels, etc. I followed my Swedish roots to Äland and heard a bit of music but mostly explored. You get around!!