Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 2 - Jönköping We left Stockholm and its scenic if somewhat austere environs for a city 200 miles to the south. Jönköping perches on the bottom edge of the country's second biggest lake, Vättern, and is the the home town of such notable persons as Agnetha from Abba, Nina Persson (Cardigans fame) and a man with whom James and I have much in common - Olympic kayaker Anders Gustafsson. Leaving behind the convenience of an H&M on every corner and an off-license never more than an hour's walk away we began the road trip proper. Urban sprawl gave way to endless coniferous forest, clatter and chatter to 101 Party Classics, a 5CD odyssey charting the highs of pop music over the preceding decades. It also, inevitably, included some lows and to counter this we were each granted five vetoes. However these were to apply to the entire CD collection in the car which were to be played back to back in strict alphabetical order. Looking at some of the CDs my vetoes would...

Day 1 - Stockholm Road. Trip. Two words whose constituent parts of car, road, here and there are less than the whole. They don't capture the listless miles, the blurred tarmac, the landscape passing on either side like the bars of an equaliser. They don't capture the urge to leave, the limitless reach and limited grasp, the, for want of a better word, romance. Kerouac got it, Hopper and Fonda summed the stateless rebellion of just driving, or in their case riding. Is it more about the dots or the lines? The getting there or the getting there? So...road trip, as good a reason as any to be be getting up at 3AM on a nondescript Tuesday to catch the night bus to Gatwick Airport and begin a journey back to England via 11 countries, 12 cities and 2550 miles of road. I was flying with a friend to meet a friend in  Stockholm. Matt had gone over to compete in a ironman competition which is a physical epic comprising a ride, a swim and a run. That doesn't do justice to over 10 hour...

And so began our Swedish odyssey... The following is set between the 25th and 28th of February 2006, events occur in real time. Beep...beep...beep... DAY 1 The country didn't instantly warm to us and it wasn't the sub-zero temperatures. We flew into Skavsta airport deftly avoiding the flying sharks on the way over. Jess was instantly in dreamland, with so much powdery white stuff around we thought we'd flown to to Colombia by mistake! Scabhole isn't exactly local to the capital so we embarked on a short (long) bus trip to Stockholm and were greeted by the incredibly exciting and rare sight of an Ikea store - in Sweden!! Whats next, we all thought, a Volvo?? We checked into our five-star hotel (***** count 'em) and immediately decided to pay several visits to the seventh and eight floors all the while accompanied by a strange voice intoning LO-BAY. As soon as the novelty of being human yoyos wore off we dumped the luggage and formulated a plan of action. Since ...