10 September 2002 - Closed
After the traditional early start, we wandered down to the closed restaurant and smiled sweetly at people until they gave in and cooked us breakfast. A lot of breakfast. Far too much breakfast. Cereal, eggs, bacon, sausages, pancakes, fruit, bread, toast, cheese, ham, Danish pastries and coffee was generously thrust upon us until we felt ill!

Back to the room for a rest then.

A final sweep of the room for removable Lego goodies, a quick contemplation of the minibar and Al remembered his film in the fridge... Checked out and packed up, the mission was once again obvious - Lego Land, here we come!

Once inside, we made our way straight to the Lego Driving School. Via the Lego Canoe Log Flume and the Lego Racers Rollercoaster, obviously.

And that's when it happened.

The disappointment. The tears. The tantrum.

The pain of a 20 year old Vendetta that can never be fulfilled.

It will come as no surprise that, whereas aged 7 Dan had been one year too young to qualify for his Lego Licence, he was now fourteen years too old. And about 1 meter too tall. We won't even look at the maximum weight figures. Inconsolable for a good 2 minutes, it looked like Al might have to go on alone whilst Dan plotted to blow up the park - until an ice-cream stall was found, that is. Kids eh?

A quick trip to the Lego Shop, a serious debate as to whether or not we needed £400 worth of Williams F1 Lego (or indeed, had room in the car), a final walk past the driving school and we were back on the road, albeit with an air-bag warning light glowing on the dash of the Mini. We'll ignore that for the time being though. 2 pm - another early start to the next leg of the journey! Waving goodbye to the happy serial killers of Billund, we started our island hopping journey from Denmark to Sweden, via the worlds longest bridge (about 11 miles in all, with a 6km central span. 1,2,3 oooh...). Actually it was quite disappointing. It looked like a small Severn Bridge between two very long causeways, although you only have to pay £3 to cross the Severn - not £25.

Sweden - a nation of Volvo drivers. Realistically something should have twigged before we got here. The Volvo driver phenomenon isn't just an English problem, oh no. The lack of indicators, accelerators and mirrors is a standard option in all Volvos, even in Sweden. Only here, there are thousands of them. Every car that isn't a Saab in fact, is a Volvo. And when you're trying to do 1400 miles through the wilderness, this is not a good thing. Fortunately the scenery was quite awesome and the sunset over the lake was the sort of thing that girls cry about and Athena make posters out of.

With the average speed back to 45mph, we decided to head a few hundred miles north to Vadstena, a mediaeval village on the shore of lake Vattern, or something that sounds like that... Originally we had chosen Bastard as the obvious destination, but it was a little out of the way, even for our childishly simple sense of humour!

It was on arrival at Vadstena at about 8pm that we discovered that Sweden was in fact closed, or discontinued through lack of demand. Vadstena made Billund look, well, inhabited at least. Heading straight to the campsite (closed - probably just as well as we still don't have any camping gear apart from Stu's tent and some butane) we then tried the four hotels in the town (closed and dark), the two hostels (closed and dark) the two 5 star hotels (fully booked out to Carlsberg, although where everyone was I don't know) and even the convent (closed and dark). The convent might have been fun though (Me? in a Swedish Convent and Girls School? At 3am? With my reputation...?!). Even the nuns had sold out to the corporate whoredom of Carlsberg. There were still no people around though, not even in the dark hotels, let alone in the town. Very odd.

Giving up on the 'stay the night idea', we decided to head for some food and worry about sleep later. Of course, it will come as no surprise that all of the restaurants in this 'popular tourist destination' were in fact closed. Ghost town number 2 appeared in the rear view mirror... Well, it would have done if we could see out of the back of the car.

4 hours after our arrival in Vadstena, after driving cross country under some of the strangest fog we had ever seen, we finally found an open hotel just off the motorway about 60 miles north of the lake (via McDonalds, the only 24 hour service in the entire country!). Apparently hotels close at about 4pm - if you haven't checked in and got a key by then, tough - the doors are locked and everyone goes home. The exception to this rule is the international chains that hang around at motorway junctions playing host to lonely business men at £5 a pint and £10 for the more interesting TV channels. And no, we didn't pay for the 'additional' channels! Apparently, and I quote, "In this part of the world I consider porn channels a basic civil liberty... Bloody outrageous charging for it!". Instead we watched a programme with a flying cow in it.

By now we had decided that Sweden is a silly place. And it isn't full of Victoria Silvstedt lookalikes either.

More soon.....

p.s. you can see for yourselves just how far we've come - take a look at http://www.mini-adventures.co.uk/images/arctic/progress.gif for our route so far!

<< Click the back button on your browser to return