ÖREBRO TO SUNNE

Joelle McDonald
Jul 16, 2022
10 min read

Osets Naturreservat • Örebro Castle • The Karlslund Manor House and Garden • Karlstad • Lake Vänern • Sunne

Run to Osets Naturreservat: “A Haven for Hikers and Cyclists”

--- Map Point 1 ---

This morning starts with an alarm at the ungodly hour of 7:00. That may not sound so early to everyone reading this, but with the level of exhaustion we are at after traveling on our own for almost three weeks in three unfamiliar countries, it is early. After hitting snooze a couple times I get myself up and out the door for my long run. Last night I spent a while on AllTrails trying to figure out where to run here and I think there is a dirt trail starting at the Örebro Castle, which we are staying right next to, and going out for 33 kilometers. Hopefully I can find it and AllTrails is right.

Running to the castle over cobbled streets (they look super pretty but are horrible to run on) and past at least three art installations, I find a paved sidewalk along the river. I check my GPS just a few minutes into my run, a lesson I took from Copenhagen when I checked my GPS after running the wrong way for 10 minutes. Okay, I am headed the right way. Hopefully this will turn into dirt.

As I go, I pass Wadköping, a collection of old traditional Swedish buildings hosting shops, cultural handicraft, and information; the main park in town; and the harbor. The trail is a bit hard to follow in the city and it switches between paved and dirt, but eventually I reach a nature reserve. It may seem odd to travel so far then be glad when something feels almost exactly like home, but the nature reserve did feel so much like the trails around lakes at home. The main differences: the weather is pleasantly warm rather than 100 baking degrees, the air is full of moisture, there isn’t a browned plant in sight, and there seems to be no trail etiquette. I spend I lot of my run trying to figure out the latter to no avail, but at least everyone is pleasant. I am getting a lot of practice saying “Hej” (hello in Swedish) to the smiling walkers, cyclists, birdwatchers, and joggers.

Örebro Castle

--- Map Point 2 ---

After a quick breakfast at the hotel and lugging all our stuff to the parking garage (it took much less time to find it today than last night) off to the castle we went. The castle isn’t nearly as ornate as the others we have seen during our travels. It is essentially just four round towers in a square connected by simple stone building with a courtyard in the middle. As we arrive and pay for entrance an English tour is just beginning so we hop on it. Here are some of our takeaways (Warning: disturbing content. Skip number five if you are a kid or sensitive to grossness, torture, and death.):

Adult men were allotted 9 liters of beer a day
During parties at the castle, over 50 courses were served and it was considered incredibly offensive not to eat every bite of every course. However, that was so much food that in order to eat it all attendees would have rooster feathers and would call over a servant with a bucket. Then they would stick the feather down their throat so they would throw up and could continue eating. This is where linguists think the term “Cocktail Party” comes from. The puke from the buckets was fed to the pigs.
There was a painting of the sexiest man alive winner of 1542. King Gustav Vasa was portrayed with a massive belly, which was fashionable at the time because it meant you could afford to eat a lot, and very strong, toned calves, also fashionable at the time. The castle’s experts think these legs were not his, but a soldier’s. They think the King lined up all the soldiers and picked the one with the best calves to model. At the time big calves were so fashionable that people would carve bigger calves out of wood and stuff them down their stockings. Our guide called this painting “A very early version of photoshop.”
The castle was under constant renovation while it was managed and ruled by Duke Charles (Gustav Vasa’s son) because he was never happy with it. A castle was seen to be a representation of its rulers esteem and power, so he wanted his castle to be incredible. The castle’s renovations were only finished once he eventually died and stopped interrupting the process.
If given the choice between execution and life in prison at the time, execution was by far the better choice. Reasoning:
- The prison received no light or air except from a tiny hole near the floor. That hole was not big enough for much air or any light to come in, but it was plenty big for countless rats, snakes, and water from the Black River to get into the prison. Since it was completely dark inside the prisoners couldn’t see the creatures, but they could hear and feel the snakes and rats crawling on and near them.
- The prisoners were given food and water twice a week. The food was usually moldy bread and rotten food from farms. The water came from the Black River, which was the city’s sewer and made the prisoners sick. At the time, everyone drank beer because water was so unsanitary it was sure to kill.
- The average life span of a prisoner once they were in the dungeon was one week because the water caused so much disease.
- The dead bodies were only removed twice a week, when the soldiers brought food and water. If someone died between visits their body would stay and rot.
- People had to go to the bathroom where they were shackled.
- The lucky prisoners were shackled by the wrists or feet along the wall where they could sit. The unlucky, who committed what were considered the most horrible crimes (including murder, which I agree is bad, and homosexuality, which I very much do not) were shackled by the neck and standing, so they had to stand until they finally died.
- Yes, there was a torture chamber.
- Execution was usually just hanging or decapitation: horrible but much better than dying in the above conditions over the course of a week. According to our guide “they saved the really creative stuff for torture.”

The Karlslund Manor House and Garden

--- Map Point 3 ---

We are on our way out of Örebro and decide to make one last stop, just outside town, at the Karlslund Manor. We don’t know much about it except it is supposed to have beautiful summer gardens and is “Well worth a visit when the flowers are in bloom.” We follow Google Maps to get there, which we have had mixed success with recently. The GPS takes us up a super steep driveway and reveals a big white house with a fountain a few meters from the front door and two other buildings set out symmetrically. We don’t see anywhere to park though… Ugh, is this going to be another draining parking endeavor? We drive down the other side of the driveway, passing what we think is a no cars sign. Oops. Though, we really aren’t sure what any of the signs here mean except the speed limit ones and the rare stop sign in English, so maybe we are good. Just down the hill we find a gravel parking lot. Thank goodness because we really didn’t have another eight step parking extravaganza in us so soon (see our July 16 blog post).

We walk back up the big driveway hill and, dodging sprinklers, reach the house. Is it open to the public? There are things in the windows and a café out back, so it definitely isn’t abandoned. Is it a museum or a hotel? We try the front door but it remains tightly sealed. There is a ramp to the side door just to our right, let’s try that. No dice. There are clothes in that window. Wait… does someone live here? No… right? There is a café. Why would there be a café run out of the bottom floor if this was a private residence?

We give up on getting inside so instead walk down the path toward the gardens. These, like the gardens at Frederiksborg Castle in Copenhagen, are restored to look as they did when the house was used for its original purpose. There is a fence around it woven from light sticks and inside there are big beds with widely spaced rows. This garden was used to grow both flowers and produce for use at the manor and even produced a surplus to sell in the town. Stepping inside the gate, the air comes alive. Fat and fuzzy bumblebees bob from bud to bloom. Butterflies chase one another, photobombing with fluttering white. Beside us is a trellis supporting growing beans and across the long garden, an arch grown green with bushy vines. We walk out the arched end and turn to see a grouping of plots even bigger than this. A quick translation of the sign reveals they are private beds for citizens to use for their own growing season.

We move from the gardens to the left of the house to the trees just behind it. Here stands a maypole, used in the Swedish Midsommar celebrations. It is brown now, probably much less beautiful than it was at Midsommar, but interesting nonetheless. All I know about Midsommar is that a horror movie was made related to it (starring Florence Pugh) and that it is an old tradition involving singing and dancing around the maypole, but now that I have seen one here (spoiler alert: and continue to see them all over Sweden) I am interested to learn more.

Karlstad

--- Map Point 4 ---

With our fill of Örebro (we could have spent a lot longer here but we are on a schedule), we begin our drive to Karlstad. After a bit more than an hour we pull in outside Zest, a restaurant in the center of town that caters to… well… people like us. Hannah found it last night online while I searched for a hike for us today (oops… another spoiler). We are so excited to eat at a restaurant that, according to the Internet, is perfect for us. Our only barrier to our yummy meal: the Swedish parking system. Ugh, this again?! The spot we found right outside the restaurant requires payment until 4:00 PM on some days (it is just after 4:00 now) and 6:00 PM on others. We can’t figure out which days follow which schedules. We could just pay anyway to be safe and avoid a notoriously brutal Swedish parking ticket, but we can’t find a pay station. No, we are not having this. Not after the parking marathon of last night. We are parked right outside the restaurant and it feels like there is a 50/50 chance we don’t need to pay, so we are just going to enjoy our food and keep an eye on the car.

The food is worth the risk. We order a Vego-Mex bowl (I think the “Mex” is a stretch, the only Mexican thing about it is the black beans) and it is so good that we order another to go for dinner tonight (we didn’t have much luck online restaurant scouting in Sunne). To add to Zest’s acclaim, we ordered a Hazelnut Chocolate Mousse dessert and it was melt-in-your-mouth, say-yum-with-every-bite good. Believe it or not this is only our sixth time dining out in three weeks of traveling abroad, and it is it our fourth restaurant that we really loved. Not bad.

Segerstads Rullstolsled Hike

--- Map Point 5 ---

Sure, we did a hike yesterday, but in Sweden where everything is covered in forest and lakes and everywhere is beautiful, we didn’t get our fill. Today’s hike–Segerstads Rullstolsled–takes us along the shore of and on a boardwalk over the largest lake in any EU country and the third largest in Europe (after two in Russia): Lake Vänern. AllTrails listed the hike as “hard” but also “pram and wheelchair accessible.” It is also only 4 kilometers, so I think we can easily manage it, even after my long run. Today we find the parking lot on our first try (no parking drama here) and after a bit of debate identify the route. We are now following the red trail markers, but later on we will have to switch to orange, then blue. It was confusing, but less so than we expected.

The lake is beautiful, and seriously big. There is an archipelago just off the shore and a single boat doing some sort of water sport. When we reach the boardwalk we get to walk surrounded on both sides by tall wetland grasses, lily pads, and occasionally water free from plants. The boardwalk takes us to two islands of the archipelago, where we can walk down to the water and take in the stillness.

On the way back I notice the blueberry bushes carpeting the forest floor. We pass a pile of picked berries in the middle of the trail, which calls my attention to the bushes. Part of me wants to pick and eat some, but without Simon (our hiking friend from yesterday) to tell us they are definitely okay to eat, I hold back.

When we got back to the car I was able to confirm that this hike was definitely not hard, as it was labeled on AllTrails. I decided to send AllTrails a suggested edit to change the difficulty on the hike listing from "hard" to "easy," with my reasons of course. To anyone out there who thinks that they can't make a difference in the world, I disagree. Now, if you click the link included here to the AllTrails page for our hike, it is classified as easy! We are out here making the world a better (or at least more accurate) place.

Sunne

--- Map Point 6 ---

The drive to Sunne is uneventful, but we still really don’t like driving our rental car. As Hannah put it, “This car needs to be a little bit smarter or a little bit dumber.” It has the ability to detect when you are getting too close to leaving your lane, then nudges the car back toward the center of the lane, a helpful feature if it only activated when we want it to. The car keeps nudging the wheel unhelpfully, either with bad timing, too much, or not enough. We are trying to adjust to how sensitive the steering is as we are also trying to deal with the sensitivity of the break and accelerator on roads littered with speed cameras. Seriously, they are everywhere and tickets here are expensive. If you ever visit Sweden, beware.

We arrive at our hotel, check in, heave our luggage up to our room, and collapse on the bed to watch Persuasion on Netflix. Thoughts: it was very slow but really good. We pause around 9:50 to go out on the hotel’s dock for sunset. We bring warm mugs of tea with us and are the perfect temperature in our jackets. “I am so happy” we both repeat on a loop. It feels so good to be watching a peaceful sunset reflecting over a lake in nice weather with a warm drink in hand and a good movie to finish. We haven’t had many moments of complete peace on our travels, so this one feel especially welcome tonight.

HM

ÖREBRO TO SUNNE

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