Lilla Göljet to Lövsjön, 20 km. Half of stage 34 of Sörmlandsleden and all of 33.

It did indeed rain all night, sometimes lighter, sometimes heavier, and stopped at around eight, at which point I got going.

Everything was wet and somewhat muddy, but there were boardwalks in most of the really muddy places.

The clouds cleared away pretty soon and I got sunshine already for my late breakfast.

After a few hours, it was as if the rain had never been at all.

Section 34 of the trail was average. Uninhabited, maybe, but that doesn’t preclude clear-cut forests.

Lunch by lake Skvättsjön, just before the end of section 34.

The first parts of section 33 were the wildest and hardest-to-walk parts of the entire trail that I can remember. Zig-zagging down steep slopes, clambering over rocks, ducking under and climbing over fallen trees. I’m glad the ground was mstly dry – doing this in the mud would have been… interesting.

All this scrambling took me back to the high cliffs of Bråviken. The view here was much more appealing than the day before yesterday: the waters of the bay were broken up by little islets, and there was a castle on the other side.

The afternoon, after the trail turned back north away from the coast, was mostly pretty pine forests. For a while the path went along the top of a ridge, probably shaped by the ice sheets ten thousand years ago. It made for nice views.

It started raining again in the early evening, with one giant rumble of thunder and a short burst of hail. I hadn’t run across any place where I could put up my tent – not even a nice space, just enough flat ground to fit me and the tent – so I kept going. At the southern tip of lake Lövsjön finally there was a space of some kind. Not much more than a roadside stop, with muddy car tracks, a worn picnic table and a trashy-looking fireplace. There was nothing more scenic to look forward to, and two-three more kilometres would take me to Kolmården with its parking lots and bus stops, so I stayed.

The magic of weather forecasts and live radar maps made my evening a lot nicer than it could have been. When I stopped, it was raining quite constantly. The radar map promised that it would stop twenty minutes later. Instead of cooking dinner and putting up my tent in the rain, I huddled under a spruce tree and waited and watched the raindrops on the surface of the lake. And indeed, the rain stopped, so at least my dinner was dry.