Helsingborg

We had figured that we would spend the last night of the trip somewhere in southern Sweden, within an hour or two of the Copenhagen airport, but it was the only night of the entire trip that we hadn't booked months in advance. So while we were driving down from Oslo, M found us a place in Helsingborg, which sort of balanced our desire for time on the drive through Sweden with our need to get to the airport the next morning.

Helsingborg turned out to be a good choice, as was our hotel. It was an easy walk through the park, past the old castle tower, and down the steps to the main part of town. The view from the wall above the terrace stairs looked out across town, towards the harbor, and over the narrow northern part of the Øresund to Denmark. It would be hard to overestimate the strategic importance of this high bluff, since virtually any shipping in and out the Baltic goes by here.

The next morning, I walked back down and out to Tropical Beach (really, that's what they call it -- see the last photo), on the north side of the harbor entrance. There's always something special about the final morning of a long trip, knowing that by the end of the day, we'll be back in Seattle.

Mellbystrad

By late afternoon, I had already taken several potential side trips off my list. M had found us a place to stay in Helinsgborg and we still had a long ways to go. But the highway swung close to the coast near Laholm and I decided it was necessary to make a quick detour to the beach.

Mellbystrand was more of the archetype of a beach than the other beaches we had visited this trip. The beach itself was sandy and stretched for miles. There were beach houses in the dunes. There were kids playing ball and folks laying in the sun.

Tjørn Island

Continuing down the coast on our hastily improvised effort to avoid the Interstate (not that they call it that here), we stopped at a grocery store in Henån for lunch makings, then drove south across Orust and Tjörn Islands.

Skulptor i Pilane was another place I discovered completely by accident the night before. I didn't tell M much before we got close, although at some point I was sufficiently lost that I needed help. She noticed the great white head first - it was hard not to. Jaume Plenta has a piece at Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park, too, but this one is much bigger. And the context is a bit different.

We ate our picnic lunch in the car, then headed off across a rocky landscape dotted with some pretty amazing sculptures. The setting is what makes this place really stand apart from many other sculpture parks - there are few, if any buildings in sight, the ocean can be seen many miles away, and the trails are laid out to make the discovery of each new sculpture a surprise.

There were older works on this landscape, too. Off to one side, and carefully identified, there were stone circles and standing stones dating back more than a thousand years. Which just enriches the context for a modern day sculpture park.

Fjällbacka

We would spend about 24 hours in Sweden on this trip - all along the southwest coast as we drove south from Oslo towards Malmo and the Øresund Bridge, which would take us back to Denmark and CPH for our flight home.

I hadn't given this stretch much thought beforehand, so my list only emerged the night before, largely from Google Maps and Google image searches, looking for interesting looking places along the shore. As usual, I had a few more ideas for stops than we had time for, but it still turned what might have been a pretty dull day on the expressway (much of it looked like upstate New York) into something a little more interesting.

We got off the E20 soon after crossing into Sweden and drove rural roads out to Fjällbacka, pictures of which had caught my eye during my reconnaissance. It was a busy summer day in a coastal town (it could have been Maine), but we found a parking space near the base of the Kungsklyften, the trail that winds its way to the top of the cliffs. M was a little put off by the bouldery trail, but we made it through (we found a different route coming back down), and the climbed several flights the stairs to the overlook. It's amazing what you can find on the internet.