söndag 20 oktober 2013

Adventure #9 - Kolarbyn wilderness experience

One of our absolutely favourite places in the world is Kolarbyn, known as Sweden's most primitive hotel. It is an amazing place where you sleep in small wooden huts and cook your own dinner over an open fire. We discovered this place about 5 years ago when we signed up for a "family survival weekend" with Andreas, who is now the owner of this place. Since then we have been coming back here once a year for a retreat in the wilderness.

Kolarbyn is about 2 hours from Stockholm where we live, so it is convenient for a weekend trip. We left home early on Saturday and made a lunch stop in Ramnäs to do some urban exploration. Urban exploration is something that we have been fascinated with - exploring old ruins that have been left to decay. We have explored old military bunkers, forts, factories, amusement parks and this time an old saw mill. This old mill was located by a really pretty lake, so we got to do some exploration and then have lunch at a beautiful place this nice fall day.
View from our lunch 



Then we headed straight to Kolarbyn where we were greeted by Andreas. There are 12 forest huts and one small cabin, and this evening all the beds were booked. When we arrived we chopped wood, started a fire and made coffee over the open fire while talking to some of the other guests. The teenagers took a nap in their sleeping bags while the adults went for a walk along the shore of the lake Skärsjön. Since we always need to complicate things, we went out to a small cape in the lake through a moss that fortunately wasn't all that wet right now. We relaxed with a beer and just enjoyed the view.




Swedish version of a djungle


Back at Kolarbyn we woke up the kids and started preparing dinner. We made hamburgers and soya burgers over the fire place. And the excellent Swedish dessert "Gino" - which is sort of standard on our wilderness excursions. There is a bigger hut where you can have dinner indoors, but we had such a great evening with a starry sky so we spent the evening outdoors.

At Kolarbyn you sleep on wooden beds with a sleeping mat and sheepskin, which makes it quite comfortable actually. Each hut has a stove and candles, so it gets both cosy and warm. I had to remove my long underwear during the night since it got too warm!







We slept really well and didn't wake up until about 9.30 when most of the guests were ready to leave... But we took a slow morning, made breakfast and enjoyed the silence and wilderness before leaving and returning back to our normal busy city life.

So we made it to Kolarbyn this year as well - let's see if we can get the teenagers to join us next year or if we will make it into a romantic weekend without kids next year :-)

/A

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