Off to Finland, oh make that Estonia

Well all good things must come to an end, and with approaching fronts we decided it was time to get on our way to Helsinki.

weather....

And in the Finnish archipelago everything looks much nicer!

Helsinki is a most attractive city from the air...

Here the port with some of the archipelago in the background

All those nicely renovated and maintained classical buildings.

In Helsinki we had to accept that all good things come to an end sooner rather than later, after 3h on the ground we admitted our defeat after finding only one hotel room available in the whole city (for €215 a night), took our bikes apart and headed off to nearby Talinn, Estonia, after checking that accomodation was no problem there (and more like €40 a night).

Stockholm once more

Some airshow shenanigans: note our plane in the mid ground, with the boeing stearman with 2 wing walking ladies in the middle of the frame....  One of Haakan's rare WWI Klemm airplanes in the foreground

A few old warbirds go overhead

We had a fun day exploring Stockhold with Mats and Tina, who we met last year at Skaa and have kept in contact with, here on one of the islands  Thanks guys!

We met Haakan at the Eslov airshow, his Klemm planes are very rare so he brought one in for people to look at and it was parked next to our plane.  In the short time he was at the show, he was kind enought to invite us to his airfield near Stockholm and let us stay in his man cave.

Haakan has lived a varied life and has dozens of crazy stories to tell about his adventures.  In Lithuania in the early 90s he bought some broken down horses, dug a pit, shot the horses and waited for the wolves to come......

Airstrip, farm buildings and the conference centre one of his sons runs.  Yellow is traditionally the colour that the nobility (or the rich) painted their houses in Sweden.  Haakan's estate is historically significant, but I'm afraid I've forgotten the details.

One of the Klemms

At a friend of Haakan's former petrol station

Having a chat with Haakan standing still for a moment on the left, Niko on the right

Nearby Sigtuna's town hall.  Sigtuna is Sweden's first city, founded in 980AD but long surpassed by Stockholm

Jimmy is a local of Sigtuna and very kindly showed us around, including some of the church ruins.

Bunge privately owned ex-military airfield

Yep, it's like a dream come true. We were met with a very kind welcome from Gert, Inga, Gert's son Claes and his brother Tore, who were having a working bee and had a great time staying there.

It is an amazing airfield with a quite beautiful wooden ceilinged hangar.  Most of the original furnishings from the military were left behind, but we opted to stay in a bedroom rather than a bunk room :-)

Ju & Tore

Gert very kindly showed us some amazing flying movies, which great footage in his cinema and in the future they will have a little aviation museum which we will come back to see.

One of Visby's 12 ruined churches

Bunge is on Gotland, which has the most amount of sun per year in Europe (due to the long long clear summer days) and is a popular holiday destination.  We could see why.  The main town, Visby is a beautiful medieval walled town in good condition and the little island just a short ferry ride north of Bunge, Faarae is beautifully wild.

Special rock formations

thatched summer farm

fantastic Gotland sheep, they are so soft!

The terrain was harsh and hard on the tyres, but oddly beautiful

Visingsö, lake island

Visingsö is an island in Sweden's second biggest lake. Hopefully the coldest, as we had a dip at the end of the runway - I lasted 10sec and Ju 20.

It is a really beautiful location and you can camp on the shore of the lake (if you're not worried by the powerful cooling effect from the breeze over the cold water). It is also pretty much inside a golf course so is a great destination for flying golfers.

Lennart & Terry, fantastic guys we met at Eslov with their most awesome SeaMax flying boat

We cycled through town (there are hire bikes at the airfield for people who don't bring their own bikes) which was really very cute and had  little market where I bought a local lake salmon from the lady who had smoked it.

Then we tied up the bikes for the ferry to Gränaa (50kr return, bikes 30kr return), which is a nice journey. Aparently Gränaa is one of the oldest towns in Sweden, well we missed that because of all the candy cane shops, actually they're more the shape of Brighton Rock, though not so hard and come in all flavours you can imagine, plus some you probably can't (strawberry or raspberry salt licorice flavour candy canes anyone?)

That night Johan and Vanya from Stockholm/Siljansnäs arrived. Johan flew around the world when he was just out of university and managed to get sponsorship for.most of his equipment and much of the costs, brilliant!  They use scooters for getting around, which is a great space saving idea, allowing them to tour with their dog.  I'm thinking maybe in future we use scooters or just strap on roller skates.  It would make packing so easy!

Johan, Vanja and Vincent (little head in cockpit)

Eslöv fly in

This was an amazing event, organised by the Swedish EAA (light aircraft assosiation). It used to be held at the now closed Stockholm Barkaby airfield, and has been a roaming event for the last 3 years. Eslöv town was celebrating 100 years (of something), so the fly in was held there, with an airshow on the sunday for the people of the town.

Plane registration: SE for Sweden, X for experimental (home built and rare planes that are no longer factory supported).

We arrived on Friday night and parked next to the adventurous aerial photographers Dieter and Marie Betz. Dieter lived in Alaska for 8 years with the bears and has written several childrens books about them (also several other books, I just haven't yet checked alibris to see what is available). He has a beautifully restored Piper Cub and a tent that is a perfect colour tone match to his paint scheme.

Dieter & Marie

The charming Carsten, from Anholt (tiny Danish island)

Friday and Saturday night the air club had organised bbqs for dinner. The had about 10 half oil drums with coals and a grill over the top. You queued to bring your dinne ticket to the counter, got given a very large amount of meat, which you then grilled yourself. This was a great way of doing a dinner, as you naturally ended up chatting to the other people.

The airshow on Sunday was great, my favourites were the glider aerobatics (like gymnastics) and the army Saab Gryppen, an amazingly powerful jet. I'm not sure how you're meant to be stealthy in a plane like that...  We didn't take many photos as we were getting information overload and having trouble focussing on one thing at once :-)

Old American navy Boeing Stearmen (the one at the back is marine), I like this photo, as it shows how low they are flying

Skånes Fagerhult a little piece of paradise.

Rosi relaxing while Julian plays with a fishing rod, note bbq in foreground

I found this airfield from the ffplume French document about travelling by ultralight in Europe and it is a little gem.  I have linked to the Belgian page on which I originally found this document, as they have many other useful suggestions on their website.

The airfield's owner, Bo, has built a log cabin which you can hire by the night, with kitchen, bathrooms, washing machine and most importantly, sauna. The airstrip is on a lake (overshoot the 550m runway and you'll be in it!) and you can watch the lake, your plane and the spotty Indian ponies grazing by the lake from the dining table. Being Sweden it is surrounded by light birch forest.

The lake, ponies hiding

Naturally we had to cycle around the lake system (bike hire included in the hut price) and then Cris heard about 10kg pikes living inthe depths of the lake, so he was off on a mission to find hooks for the fishing rods so he could row the boat out and catch the big one for our dinner...  Well the big one ended up being 4 tiddlers who had to be thrown back, but I think fishing is more about the expectation than the actual result.

View out on the lake from the dining table

Love those Swedish tea light holders

That evening Bo came around with his 10 year old daughter, Amanda, to give us a go on his old farm machinery...  He has 500 ton of machinery, mostly acquired as scrap, which he has brought back into working condition. Every child's dream came true as we used the digger to move a mound of earth into a tip truck, lowered a giant pencil suspended from the pail of another digger into various buckets in a time trial and drove the steam roller.....

Julian learning to use the digger

Amanda was of course better and faster than us, but a good time was had by all.  So if you're thinking of flying from Southern Sweden to Stockholm, can I heartily recommend a stopover at Skaanes Fagerhult as a peaceful way of spending an evening or several?

Off to Soderslatts Vellinge for Malmö and farewelling Cris and Rosi

It was a wet and blustery morning that Julian and Cris took off as the first load going south, braving the at times 70 knot winds. Rosi and I stayed behind to clean, drink tea and go for a walk along the lake. Tough, but someone had to do it!
In the afternoon, when we'd all unpacked in our field near Malmö and after having iur 3pm late lunch, we strolled down the runway between the canola fields to walk along the foreshore (and eventually get abus to Trelleborg, as the seaweed smelt rather intense). Trelleborg is a great compact little town, with massive ferries coming regularly over from Denmark. In half an hour we had seen the major sights, including a fountain of a mermaid riding a snake-dragon (!) and were ready to hit up the supermarkets for dinner. With great talent Julian an Cris managed to get all we needed and meet the last bus (6.45pm).
Sweet.
The next day we wanted to do the 30km into Malmö, but decided (wisely as it turned out) that the hire bikes from the aerclub might not make the distance. Instead we cycled onto the big sand peninsula at the souh west corner of Sweden, which has long been the location of the holiday houses of the rich Stockholmites. There is a very impressive canal across the base of this peninsula. The bike paths out there are really good and the area is worth a look. Unfortunately not long after we'd turned back the bearings fell out of the crank in Cris' hire bike, rendering it unpedallable, so the boys ended up finding some rope and Julian towed Cris the 17kms home. It was a very windy day and a lot of that was with headwind....
Then a 10 year old on a bicycle managed to shoot out from behind a hedge and I didn't manage to take timely evasive action. Sigh. So now my bike has a broken gear lever which I hope to have fixed in Berlin in 5 weeks, as it's the first place we'll be in long enough for a repair...
Crisand Rosi managed to catch a variety of busses to make it to Copenhagen airport for their onward journey to Amsterdam, so all went well.

Flying the rugged Norwegian terrain

Eventually it was time for us to depart Siljansnaes, which was really sad as we greatly enjoyed it there.  And there were so many more places to investigate in the region.

Goodbye Siljansnaes!

Swedish lakes en route

Well hello Norway

But the weather looked ok for Norway so we thought we'd better take the opportunity.  So we went out to Reinsvoll.  And landed uphill on a very strange texture.  When we got out of the plane our feet sank into a mix of gravel and fine clay and water.  Hmmmm.

Note the slope & the rivers on the runway....

No one around so considering the miserable weather we decided to keep going to Klanten.  At Klanten we were very lucky that Arne was able to come and see us after work (9.30pm!) and help us out with petrol.

I love the aeroplane cut out from the Klanten aeroclub's shutters!

The next day the weather was still not so fantastic, so we got to meet some club members and a whole group from flying for the disabled.  I have to admit that this seems to me to be a much more exciting excursion than riding for the disabled....

Just a short discursion into the differences between Sweden & Norway from the air.  Sweden is predominantly a land of forestry, it appears to be divided into a patchwork of fields with pine trees of different ages.  As soon as we crossed the border to Norway all the land was covered in yellow wheat fields.  Which we initially attributed to the harshness of most of the land making people make the most of any arable land, but in fact turns out to be due to large subsidies paid by the government to the farmers, as Norway is a country very wealthy from its oil fields.

Klanten - we camped next to the trampoline

And again off topic - loved the pine clad bathroom, when you have a shower it smells like the sauna, mmmm.

In the afternoon the weather had cleared a bit and since the forecast was not improving over the next few days, we decided to see if we could make it over the mountains to the Sogndal fjord.  We kept a good eye on the wind direction (as it causes up- and down- drafts on the mountain faces, and the last thing you want is to be blown onto a Norwegian mountain peak!) and approached with great caution and always an eye to being able to turn back.  I have to say that it was incredibly stunningly beautiful, if incredibly harsh and unforgiving. On many occasions I wished I could zoom out further to capture the amazing views.  I've been to the South Island of New Zealand and seen their fjords, whcih people say look like Norway.  And I have to say that Norway looks a lot more like Norway.  Amazing.

check out the mist in the next valley

Awesome terrain

steep drops into the valley

Bad weather out the left window, inc snow

more hills

and here the fjord is starting

crazy mountains