Not a proper review, just some notes for myself.

We went to the theatre today for the first time in forever and saw “Forever Piaf”, a musical about the life of Edith Piaf. A mother/daughter pair (Malena and Beata Ernman) together played Piaf – often on the scene together, one representing Piaf’s external reality and the other one her inner thoughts. An ensemble played the roles of all the other people in her life – mentors, friends, colleagues lovers, more lovers. Somewhat confusingly the same man played several of them, which I guess may have been intended to show how she was drawn to similar men over and over again, but for me it just ended up muddling things.

Many of her most well-known songs were represented but not performed in full. The songs were often woven into her story and sometimes it was unclear to me – not super familiar with all her works – where one ended and the next one began.

Not bad but not quite what I had hoped for, either.

We’re making another batch of candied (flowering) quince this year. Such mouthwatering goodness.

I have ignored everything in the garden this season to the point where I really feel guilty about it. But not guilty enough to counterbalance the total lack of energy and desire to do anything about it, most of the time. Except today I actually cleaned out the weeds from the strawberry planters. Next year we might actually get some berries.

Macro photos from the first evening of my hike, of things I found on the tiny crescent of sandy beach just east of Uddevalla bridge.

There were shells, and halves of shells, and shards of shells, everywhere. So different from the rocky beaches on the East coast and the Stockholm archipelago.

Hällesdalen to Stenungsund, 13 km. Only part of today’s walk actually followed the Kuststigen trail – the rest was just to get me to a point where I could hop on a train back to Stockholm.

A chilly, foggy morning, until the sun finally rose above the treetops and banished both the cold and the fog.

Shortly after breakfast I left the marked trail and made my own way south towards Stenungsund and its train station. I rather enjoyed this, because it gave me something to pay attention to. I mostly zig-zagged along small back roads right in sight of the large, numbered road and managed to stay away from that larger one all the way to the outskirts of Stenungsund.

The online map for Kuststigen was most helpful here, because of its impressive level of detail. It’s a real topographical map, down to the level of individual buildings. In fact the map was consistently more useful than the trail markers these past four days. The blue-topped posts marking the trail were often hard to see: too far apart, hidden in bushes, tucked away behind some electrical cabinet, etc. The easiest way to see whether I was on the right track was to compare the shape of my trail in my tracking app to the shape of the trail on the official Kuststigen site. (What a contrast to Sörmslandsleden, where the physical markers are exemplary and the online maps suck.)

The north side of Stenungsund was truly boring to walk through. A straight, flat road past industrial estates. It was a relief to reach the train station.

All in all, this was one of my most boring hikes. I feel no particular desire to visit this trail again. Perhaps the rest of Kuststigen has more inspiring sections, but if that’s the case then I wish that the designers of this trail had not included these boring parts.

I wouldn’t say these four days were wasted but they definitely didn’t deliver what I had hoped: beautiful views, long hours of meditative walking away from houses and roads and civilization.

From Bräcke to Hällesdalen, 20 km.

The morning offered yet more underwhelming hiking. I literally had breakfast on top of a newly clear-cut hill among tractor tracks, because the alternative would have been to stop on the verge of an asphalt road. At least on the hill I got some sunshine. I kept my eyes on my book and pretended my surroundings weren’t there, which is rather the opposite of what I normally want to do during a hike.

If I was three meters tall, then I would have been able to see the sea from here. Now I just saw a tall expanse of reeds.

By mid-morning I reached the outskirts of Ljungskile. I was half expecting the trail to go through some ugly industrial zone. It wasn’t quite that bad, but I did get a good kilometre or so of a cycle path running parallel to the E6 motorway.

The trail section through Ljungskile was actually one of the nicer ones today, with pleasant waterside parks and views of their lovely old church.

Shortly after Ljungskile the trail turned away from the coast. The afternoon was a pleasant, generic rural walk through mostly sunny meadows and forests. Actually giving up the pretence of this being a coastal walk was almost a relief.

In the evening I struggled again to find a good camping spot. The forests were all quite dense and seriously muddy and scruffy. I finally got to some empty pastures and found one that looked like it might have some dryish, flattish parts at the far end. Got to the far end of the pasture, put my pack down and sat down for a minute – and when I stood up again, there were suddenly horses in the pasture. Their arrival did mess up my plans but at least the timing was impeccable: it would have been so much more awkward if they had arrived when I was in the middle of cooking my dinner, for example. Horses are lovely animals but I don’t want to have to worry about them getting too interested in my stove, or my food, or my tent.

I walked back across the whole pasture fast enough to catch up with the owner of the horses, and asked her if she might have another pasture that would be dryish and flattish and also unoccupied by animals. Sure, her neighbour had one, and she was heading that way anyway. I even had a view of the sea.

From the Uddevalla bridge to Bräcke, 17.5 km.

I went to bed early yesterday, tired after a full day of walking and bored of sitting in a cramped little tent for hours. It gets dark at about seven in the evening, and there’s only so much reading I can do.

As a result, I woke up early this morning – early enough to see the sunrise, although it was cloudy and nothing much to look at.

The first half of the day’s walking was disappointingly dull. I had been hoping for lots of coastal views from this walk, or at least picturesque fishing villages or something. Instead I got suburbia. I was literally walking on asphalt roads through modern residential areas. If I want to walk through suburbs, I can get that at home in Spånga, and better than here even, because Spånga is much greener than these modern, newly landscaped gardens.

The asphalt was really hard on my feet. It is just so unyielding and has no give to it. It’s not so noticeable when you’re just walking, but with a heavy pack, I really felt it in my soles. Sore feet combined with disappointing surroundings didn’t make for a fun hike. The few times that I actually got to see the sea, I almost cheered out loud.

Suburbia is not just boring to walk through. It’s also very inconvenient for meals and other breaks. I can’t just put up my stove in someone’s front garden, or in the street! I had fewer breaks than I would have wanted, and had my breakfast much later than I would have preferred, because there was just nowhere to stop.

I wonder if the people who planned this hiking trail have actually tried walking it themselves. Or maybe they’ve just done it in short, easy chunks, with no need for a lunch break, and a car waiting for them each afternoon.

The trail followed this little “Wellspring path” for a short while so I was hoping for fresh spring water, but I didn’t see an actual spring anywhere.

A good thing about walking through built-up areas is that the lack of a spring was not a cause for worry. There are houses everywhere, with water on tap inside them. All I need to do is knock on a few doors.

I stopped for a late lunch at around two o’clock, yet again because there was nowhere to stop among all the houses. Finally I got from suburbia into a slightly more rural area with a small fenced pasture, where I could put down my pack and sit down.

I had a bit of a scare as I checked the map app and it informed me that I had walked less than 8 km. I had planned for about 15 km per day – if I have only walked 8 km by two o’clock, I’m not going to be anywhere near my goal! It turned out that the app had stopped tracking for a while, due some power-saving feature trying to be clever, so it had missed a chunk of my trail. I know I’ve walked more in reality, but this stressed me out a bit.

I didn’t enjoy this afternoon’s walk much at all. My surroundings were OK but nothing special, my feet were sore and the pack felt heavy. And then I struggled yet again to find a place where I could stop for the night, and had to keep walking longer than I had intended. The last kilometre or two were not fun.

I’ve had less enjoyable days outdoors – the slushy gale in Skarvheimen comes to mind – but this takes the prize for sheer plodding boredom.

I thought I’d do something new again this year for my autumn hike. (I’ve gone to Jämtland several times, and hiked the Kinnekulle trail last year.) The coastal trail in Bohuslän (Kuststigen) is supposed to be nice, so I’m trying out the first few stages of it.

Day 1: through Uddevalla to the start of stage 1, then stage 1 and most of stage 2. 15.5 km.

The first bit was pure transportation, getting from my hotel to roughly the starting point of the trail. Though I cheated a little bit and skipped a few hundred metres of asphalted road through an industrial/commercial zone, and cut straight to the point where the trail meets the Bäveån river.

Through Uddevalla the coastal trail wasn’t marked at all as far as I could see, because it overlapped with a “riverside walk”. I’m sure there was actual information about this somewhere, but I was left to just deduce it from the lack of other signs.

I was expecting a riverside walk to be sedate and civilized, but in places it took me up and down quite steep, rocky slopes and was overall more demanding than I had expected. It took me a while to see that at some point the path had split into two, and I had ended up on the one marked “difficult” in tiny, white letters. The people marking this trail sure expect their visitors to read the small print carefully! Still I rather enjoyed these sections and later chose the difficult option intentionally.

The path followed the river all the way from one side of Uddevalla to the other – past waterfalls, through the city centre, and then through a harbour. Along the way I read interesting information plaques, as the tourist I was, about how the river was used to power sawmills and power plants, about the funeral procession of Karl XII passing through Uddevalla, and about the fire that devastated the city in 1806.

Towards the edge of the city, I could see the industrial harbour on the other side of the river, and far off in the distance the Uddevalla bridge.

The path was getting a bit scruffy at this point and I expected it to peter out into a muddy gravel path at any moment. And then all of a sudden, just as I got out of the city for real, it turned into a beautiful boardwalk that hugged the rocky coast and had perfect views in all directions.


I kept following the coast all day. Sometimes the view opened up forward, towards the west and the Uddevalla bridge again. Other times the coast curved back and I had views back toward the harbour again. I passed through the old seaside resort at Gustafsberg, which was rather picturesque, but also newly built suburbia, which was rather less so.

I made camp in a small patch of woods just before the bridge that I had been walking towards all day. It felt appropriate and symbolic, somehow. It also seemed to be the last bit of free ground, according to my maps, before the trail would take me back into more inhabited areas.

This 65-litre pack fits supplies for 4 days and not much more. It’s all that food! If I was walking in the mountains between STF huts where I could buy food, I think I could keep going for weeks with the same-sized pack.