In the morning, John and I packed up the mess we always seem to make in the room and went down to breakfast. The breakfast room in the Hellstens Malmgård was probably the cold storage cellar of the manor house. It has an old brick vaulted ceilings, and there are still a couple hooks in the ceiling which must once have held slabs of meat. The room does not, however, have any windows and John found it claustrophobic after a while. We saw another guest there wearing cycling gear and figured that he was one of the two who would be on the tour with us.
At nine o'clock we went out with our luggage, as we had been instructed, and found a minivan from Stockholm Taxi waiting for us. Our two fellow travelers introduce themselves. Stephen, the man we had seen having breakfast, was from Reading, England. John was from Melbourne, Australia, though, he noted, originally from Perth. We talked with them for about a half hour as the taxi took us to Tyresö where we were to meet up with Carmen from Nordic Trek. The taxi driver complained about the terrible Stockholm traffic though to me the delays were barely noticeable.
We were met in the parking lot of the Tyresö Castle with a van pulling about a dozen bikes and a Volvo station wagon with another couple bikes attached to it. About a dozen more people including a couple children emerged. I was surprised and not altogether happy. One of the things I have liked on the previous bike trips was that they just were time for John and I to have fun riding together. I was not keen on going in a group here. It was pretty easy to spot Carmen, our local contact from Nordic Track. Not only was she clearly in charge of all the equipment, but she looked Spanish. All of us were given our assigned bikes and she handed out some well-worn panniers to us.
She also made sure each group had first aid and bicycle repair stuff. She offered us helmets; somewhat to my surprise John did not take one. When all the equipment was distributed, she called us around and went over the five day schedule with us. She was clearly proud of the elaborate notes that she had prepared, the ones that had driven me crazy the night before. I must have rolled my eyes once or twice because John jabbed me in the side.
Carmen talked for close to an hour. By the time she was finished, I decided I really rather liked her. It was eleven o'clock when we started our trip. We are still on the mainland today, though we are about as far out of Stockholm as you can get. Our route today will take us from Tyresö down through the Tyresta National Park to Dalarö. We will spend the night near Dalarö at a hotel in Smådalarö. I doubt I will ever be able to even come close to pronouncing these names correctly. This will be about 20 miles, and it should be probably the hardest day of bike riding of the trip. This is the full map of our journeys.
If we had had more time, I would have enjoyed looking more at Tyresö Palace.
It was built as fortification for Stockholm in the seventeenth century, and then converted into a stately home in the late nineteenth century. But we didn't have much time here as we were already running late according to our schedule. We rode around the grounds for a few minutes, and then I started the Garmin GPS to see if it would get us to our destination.
I felt more comfortable with it guiding me than a map and some notes, no matter how detailed. We shared the road at first with a fair amount of traffic. The terrain was hillier than I expected. I certainly missed my e-bike when I had to climb some steady hills. The mountain bike I had been given was adequate. I have to be honest that I had hoped for something better. After a couple miles, we lost track of all of our fellow riders. The scenery, particularly at first, was stunning beautiful.
As we went deeper into the forest it became a bit more monotonous: granite outcroppings covered with lichen, spruce and fir forests flecked by white birch. As we entered the national park, cars came by only intermittently. There were a couple places where we were supposed to put our bikes down and go hiking, but none of these sounded all that interesting and John is not much for hiking. We pushed on riding our bikes. About two o'clock we stopped to eat some of the snacks we had purchased the night before. The GPS generally did a great job of guiding us. But we did reach a point when I figured out that I might have missed the turn off that we should have taken on Carmen's map. We debated going back to take this back road, or pushing ahead to ride on the main highway. We decided in favor of the latter course. I think we probably did the best thing here; talking to others later on I learned that the back route was pretty rough in spots. But the highway was also not the easiest either. The cars came by at almost German speeds, and some drivers were clearly annoyed by cyclists. Fortunately, after a couple tough miles, the Garmin pointed us to a side road that paralleled the main highway until we came into Dalarö.
It is hard to imagine a Swedish town more charming than Dalarö. It is close enough to Stockholm that it can serve as a suburb, but it is mostly a summer getaway. There is a small church here.
A plaque in front of the building indicates that it was the only part of the town spared when the Russians burned the town during the Great Northern War of the early eighteenth century. For some time, Dalarö was the place where ships coming into Stockholm had to pay customs. Later, it became the haunt of the wealthy and intellectuals. Unfortunately, it suffered a serious fire in the late nineteenth century and only a couple buildings from its heyday survive.
We wandered about a bit. We stopped at the grocery store to buy some ibuprofen and some diet coke. John also picked up some pricy but extraordinarily flavorful strawberries from a man in a stall near the bus shelter.
We decided to push on to our hotel. It was about five kilometers further down the road, and Carmen had warned us that this stretch was probably the most difficult. She was right. I really, really missed my e-bike on a few of these hills. A couple times I just gave up and walked the bike. The scenery was once again dramatic, but I was so busy at times feeling sorry for myself that I paid little attention. It all seemed worth while, however, when we caught sight of our hotel.
The Smådalarö Gård is a charming hotel situated on a sheltered inlet.
The oldest section of the hotel is an large early eighteenth century home. It has been updated considerably, of course, but it retains a certain elegance from that earlier time.
We checked in, and carried our bags up to our room on the second floor. John went off to explore the grounds, and he found a comfortable spot down by the water. We relaxed after our long bike trip. In the evening we had a fine meal at the restaurant overlooking the water.
