 Hey Aljupa and welcome to my big Swedish adventure. I'm riding the length of Sweden from north to south. In the previous episode we decided that we had had enough of biting insects so we changed our route and headed toward the coast. And we danced like a couple of dorks around the maypole. You know some mornings you wake up and you just feel puffy? I haven't seen my face yet, let me turn the screen up here. Oh yeah, oh no! Good morning! Here's Mikke making his own YouTube videos, good morning! And you've made some nice healthy oatmeal. So did you bring more or less stuff than you usually bring? I brought a bit less than I usually do. This is only a three or four day trip for me. It looks like a pretty tight setup to me. You've got a front roll bag and another little bag. And you've got your seat pack and a frame pack. That's pretty light. I'm digging it. I like my setup right now. I've got these awesome aero racks with these two bags. One is camping, one is clothes. Got the tent up here. Food goes in there, electronics, cameras. And I like not having a big roll on the front so I can see things better when I'm riding my bike. But you know, I change things up all the time. It's not always going to stay the same. And then of course I have my hydration pack which allows me to keep a lot of weight off the bike. I have my drone in there, two and a half liters of water. My spare belt is right here. And some other knick-knacks. All right, bike. It's going to have a great day. What are you saying? All right, here we go. No crashes, no flaties, no whammies. How do you say that in Swedish? Inga krascher, inga punkteringer, inga uliker. Inga uliker. That's kind of like translated to like bad luck, uliker. My knee is acting up a bit. I was hoping to wake up today and feel all better because it seemed like it progressively got better yesterday throughout the day. So maybe it just needs to warm up. We shall see. For now the left foot, the left leg is doing the work. Love these tree-lined roads. Stunning, it's so green. So here we are riding on this beautiful gravel road and we see this old bike next to the mailbox. This is kind of how bikes were back in the day, right? Yeah, this is identical to what my granddad had. And this bike is called a military bike. And in Sweden it used to be mandatory for when you were like 19 and had finished high school that you did a military service for a year and you got a bike as sort of your salary for it. So everyone back then had these kinds of bikes. And my grandpa and my grandmother lived about 30 kilometers away from each other. So this was his only means of transportation when he was like started seeing her. When he was courting his love. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's so cool. Let's see if the bell store works. Oh, no. I'm just stopping here to film this bike. You realize how many beautiful sounds there are. The birds are singing this morning. Sometimes when you're riding your bike, you know, I do love the sound of tires crunching on gravel but I also like to stop and listen. Yeah, yes. Remember one more detail about this type of bike. Underneath the rack you have some sort of storage area here. So they used to be a drawer that you could take out so you could keep your pump and a couple of spare tubes down there. In your iPhone? No. Maybe your compass. Maybe your compass. Maybe a shot bullet. You know, this forest is all pine trees and there's some forestry going on, some cutting of the trees. And it smells like Christmas out here. And in honor of Christmas, let's sing my favorite Christmas carol. Here we go. It's hard to sing when you're going uphill. We are on the Lupin Highway right here. Look at all of these beautiful flowers. Come to Sweden where the highways are lined with flowers. Mikkelherr is probably like, okay, Ryan, enough with the Lupin flowers, but this is like school picture day for my bike. I mean, it's got to sit there in the field of Lupins and just look beautiful. I promise we'll go soon. I promise. Time is ticking. Okay, let's go bike. I have been really impressed with the route today. Good job, Kamut. Lots of beautiful gravel roads and other paved roads with not much traffic. It's amazing what technology you can do today. You just put in point A to point B, make me a route, put me on gravel and boom. There you go. We are now rolling into Ønsjönsvik, which is the headquarters, the world headquarters for fjällraven, you know, super expensive Swedish outdoor clothing, and Peter Forsberg. Fuppa! The amazing hockey player that helped the Colorado Avalanche win two Stanley Cups. So we love our Peter Forsberg. A colorful, modern apartment complex. And only in Sweden would there be a ski jump right in the middle of town. Look at that. You trying to get my fries? Get out of here. Mika here says that Max is like the best fast food. They have the most vegetarian burger options. So we're trying out the Max. We're fighting off the Seagulls. And I'm excited about this one. Look at that. All plant-based. It's a spicy avocado burger. And I have some sweet potato fries. And as you know, Scandinavia in general is very expensive. The deal was about $14, which is quite a bit more than you'd pay, I think, at McDonald's, although I don't go to McDonald's very much in the United States. Get out of here. I got up for one second, literally. I stood up and looked that way. We looked back, and that bird right there grabbed the bun off the top of my $14 burger. At least I still got the good stuff. Ow! I might look like a weirdo stretching out in front of a fast food restaurant. But I need to do it to keep my knee happy. Get out of here. Okay, it's official Max wins best veggie burger so far. I've had cebilla, I've had frases, and now Max, definitely good. We're about halfway through the day. About 50-ish miles. We're going to keep on heading south along the coast. You have seen the birds stealing my food. They are seagulls. Near the coast, which is pretty cool. I didn't think I was going to come this way originally. And here I am. So this is Swedish hockey town. Yeah, this is Swedish hockey mecca. Like our version of Toronto. So lots of good players come from here? Yeah. I think they've produced like 30 NHL players over the years. Foppa, Marcus Nasslund, and the Zudin twins are the most famous ones. So mainly for most of the rest of the day we're going to be following the nice coast called Högarkusten like we're at right now. So quite a change of scenery from the wilderness back in Lapland. Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to see some coastline. Being a Colorado boy, we don't have coastline. You know what's about to happen. Ole, ole, ole, ole. I'm here at a little Ika grocery store and I got some energy bars and dried fruits and all sorts of fun stuff. But what I want to show you are these Svenska jordgubar. Strawberries are kind of famous here in Sweden and there were some kids out here selling strawberries and mykebatis and they taste so good. Fresh strawberries, jordgubar. So what did you buy in the grocery store? This is like a protein shake. Protein. And some crackers, rice, snacks. And most importantly, this Swedish candy that can be a bit controversial. Hardly anyone that's not from Sweden likes this one. What is it? It's a really salty, licorice, kind of hard candy. It's called jungle roll. Jungle, what? Jungle stuff? Jungle roll? It's like a roar, jungle roar. Oh yeah. I'll have to try that at camp tonight. Ika always takes good care of us. You ready to rock and roll? Yeah. Wait, wrong language. We are on a gravel road now that's paralleling the E4 which is a very, very busy highway in Sweden and I'm thankful to be on gravel. I can hear the cars racing by on the left side of me. The highway is not far but we're over here and we're safe and we're happy. Okay, I didn't fully avoid the E4. We got to jump on it for a couple kilometers. So this big mountain right here is kind of well known in Sweden, right? Yeah, it's called Sturiberiet We're kind of in a bad angle right now. It's a lot more impressive. It's impressive when you come down this steep hill we just came down but it's kind of unique in Sweden because it's only like two or one kilometer away from the sea here. So it's kind of the closest thing we have to Norway here where you get this steep mountains going down to a fjord. We are at a gas station now called Prim and it's time for water and every gas station has water, right? Yeah, that's your best bet for finding water here in Sweden. Basically all the gas stations with a small supermarket connected to it have water. And so it's just like a little closet here, huh? Yeah. Let's see it. Let's see it in action. Oh, it's just like a little thing right there. Look at that. Cool. Check it out. We are now on a bike path. The sea is right there. We're paralleling the E4. This is going to last about 15 to 20 kilometers. Gets us off the road. And we are safe and happy. It was sunny five minutes ago. After a little rainstorm the world smells so fresh. Just epic Swedish summer evening, warm, sunny glorious. Coming up on the high coast bridge the second longest bridge in Sweden after the really cool bridge from Malmö to Copenhagen that they built when I was an exchange student. This is pretty exciting. Oh, you see that little cafe restaurant? We're going to camp right here. We've gone a few kilometers past the bridge. And it's time to be done for the day. We went 100 miles, maybe even a little bit more. How do you feel? 100 miles. Again, yeah, I'm feeling decent enough. Now it's been a great day. It's always great cycling in the evening like this. When the temperature goes down and you still have it's just sort of overall a lovely time of the day. And this is just the most epic Swedish evening I've had on this entire trip. This is perfecto. I got here five minutes before the kitchen closed. Check this out. Oh, yes. This is going to be the best pizza ever. Look at that. I'm doing the I got some pizza and I'm camp next to a lake. Happy dance, happy dance. And I'm jumping in that lake later. You know it. Did I say life is good? It's good. And now I'm just going to wash my shirt off. This is the dirt bag washing machine. It does the job. And there's even a place to charge all my stuff in this rusty old power station thing. We've got my GoPro, my drone batteries, my phone. Oh, yeah, this is a five star accommodation. This is what it looks like when bike packers have access to water and a fence. We wash things and then dry them off. The sun just went down. I thought that wasn't supposed to happen in the summertime. Well, even though according to the weather app it's supposed to set at 11. What is it now? 10? 10 o'clock, yeah. Since the sun is standing so low as soon as it goes behind some trees over here you're going to lose an hour. But it's still probably going to be bright here all throughout the night. Just when Ryan goes like below like Stockholm it's going to get a bit darker in the night. So I'll actually see darkness? Yeah. If you're awake in the middle of the night going out to pee. So I have a question. Summertime Swedes live in the summer because winter is the opposite of this. And you live quite a bit further north. What's winter like for you? I live about 200 km south of the Arctic Circle and even where I live like if you say for Christmas that week the sun probably goes up just before 10 o'clock in the morning and sets before 1 o'clock after lunch. 3 hours of sun. And you probably won't even be able to see the sun. It's just going to get a bit brighter in the sky for those hours. So it's a good thing we have a lot of Christmas decorations in northern Sweden to bright up everything. But it's usually kind of dark like in October and November and then when the snow finally comes in November as soon as you have some lights on everything is up. December is pretty okay. January and February are the worst months. What's it like? What's a daily life like? That's a lot of darkness. Especially if you work during the day you're just sitting in your office typing on your computer when you go home in the evening it's pitch black so that's all you're going to see. Wow. Imagine that. You'll be happy during those months. We look forward to these lovely summer months that we have. No, but I guess we get it done somehow and everyone up where I live usually goes on a week on a week trip down to Greece or the Canary Islands you can go to throughout the whole year and save up money to go to the sun in the middle of the winter at least get some vitamin D. That's right man, that's right. My friend you're going home tomorrow. We'll come to the end. Come to the end. For my point of view anyway. Well I can't thank you enough for all your help. It's been great to learn from you and learn about the northern lands up here and yeah man, I hope you all go subscribe to his channel and like all of his videos. He makes videos from all over Europe and stuff on bikes and as you can tell he's a really good guy, he's a good human. So we got to support good humans, right? Yeah, and I've had a blast. I've been riding for three days and it feels like we've been here for at least a week. So many things happen along the way. I know, you really get to know somebody really intimately when you ride next to them all day and then you wake up next to them and you're getting food together and you're navigating together and you're making decisions and we didn't know each other before this all came together and it's amazing how bikes can unify people, right? And Ryan's going to have a pretty quiet couple of days now without hearing me ramble on about my kids and so forth. I love hearing about your family and your wife and your job and now when I think of Northern Sweden I'm going to think about Mike and so on. You have another connection out to Sweden you have Malmö and you have Skellefteö. Skellefteö, that's what his town is called Skellefteö which is really cool. Well I wish you all the best have a wonderful summer and all rattle some time and remember, no flaties, no crashes no whammies and no mosquitos there's no mosquitos here we are in heaven no mosquitos at all alright see you guys soon well we might see him in the morning when we wake up but we're going to camp together and he's going to take off but yeah, go subscribe to his videos it is 11.15pm and as you can see pretty darn light out usually I'm in my tent by now but I'm a little wired and we got here pretty late, we didn't get here till just before 8pm we were on our bikes from 8 in the morning till 8, it was a very long day I was worried about my knee at the beginning of the day and then it got better and it's still, it's works like I rode 100 miles today so obviously it works and I'm excited to fall asleep and keep on heading south and I'm really grateful that Miike was with me for the last few days and now I'm on my own again good night I love you look what I just found on the side of the road here look at that it's the sweetest flag, maybe I can get that onto my bike somehow, that'd be fun, huh? hello there thank you for making it to the very end of this video you get a high five I am here to say, hey thank you for watching my videos, but also if my videos bring value to your life, if you love them with all your heart and soul or even just a little bit of your heart and soul please consider joining my Patreon you will help keep this channel alive but you will also get stuff you will get early release videos no ads, which is very cool and I sometimes do Zoom calls with my patrons you will have direct access to me through Patreon to ask me any question you want and like I said you're keeping this channel alive and also, hey, I wrote a book it's called The Long Way Home it's about my very first adventure from Honduras to Colorado and it talks a lot about how it inspired me to live an interesting life to say the least my mom loves it, so maybe you'll love it too I will link all this down below but more than anything, thank you so much for watching my videos you are awesome now it's time for you to get off that couch and get out there