Across the Water
Our fourth full day in Denmark, so it was about time we went to Sweden instead. I’d created another event at 6 pm over in Lund. I toyed with where to go in Sweden because none of the urban centres with easy access was exactly lush with caches. Malmö has quite a few, but it’s a big city and we didn’t have a car. That could lead to frustration.
So I checked around a bit and had a look at Lund. It’s a medium-sized town with a big cathedral, a little like Roskilde. That seemed good enough because I reckoned if we had a good day we could get upper 40s of finds possibly. That looked harder in Malmö, so I didn’t fancy it.
So the decision was made, and the plans were set.
Getting There
From our hotel in Kastrup, getting to Sweden is very easy. It hadn’t used to be, but then in 2000 the Øresund Bridge opened and it was possible to get from Copenhagen to Lund in about 30 minutes by train. So that’s what we did. We had another entertaining discussion with an assistant at the airport station about what tickets to buy and which train to catch. This time, the fun related to whether we wanted to come back or not. Clearly we did. Anyway, all done in the best possible taste, and the next train was arriving sufficiently soon that we had to run down the steps to get on it.
Turn it Down a Bit
There’s a virtual cache on one of the footbridges at Lund Station which was easy enough to do, but that particular bridge was clad in a mix of yellow and orange glass. It may have been temporary while some work was being done, but the effect was kind of disturbing.
There was another cache just off the station, and then we started heading south to get on with it.
Lund has a number of sets of adventure labs, and most of them in Lund are sequential. I don’t tend to like that because it forces your walking direction and can cause a lot of wasted walking. That was one of the reasons also why Malmö didn’t look interesting. At least in Lund they could all be walked.
Stadsparken
We worked our way south from the station towards Stadsparken. This had one set of labs and a couple of others. They proved to be a bit irritating to do. Two had answers that had to be googled. One wasn’t there and the CO had given the answer in the question. One was just incorrect and had to be guessed. So all-in-all a slightly disappointing start, but at least we found the bonus.
By this time we were ready for a rest. We’d set off a bit later than other days and it was well after 10 am when we arrived. So it was pretty much lunchtime.
One redeeming feature of Stadsparken is that it had a cafe that did some industrial-grade nice cakes.
Hitting the Town
From the park we headed northwards towards the town centre. We had a couple of misses round here, which added to a general sense that it was going slowly. But finally we made it up to the cathedral. I asked Ami if she wanted to wait here while I went to clear up a few caches north of the centre. She was happy. The cathedral is free to walk around and the weather was reasonable again, so she was happy to keep herself occupied.
One source of entertainment on this day was that the town centre had a regular convoy of graduating schoolkids doing laps in the backs of lorries. They were all wearing blue suits or white dresses and sailor hats. No idea why. But anyway, it’s a local high school tradition. They were very keen and very noisy.
Those caches to the north involved another set of labs with bonuses around the rather cute university site, plus a couple of others. They took me about an hour. Ami was where I’d left her, although she had apparently been inside the cathedral for a while.
Botanicals
It was still quite early in the afternoon. Next up was a walk over to the Botanical Gardens. There was another set of labs over there. Before that though, we made use of their cafe. It was basic, but they had nice drinks and outdoor seats.
The labs took a bit of backwards and forwards but were easy enough, and the gardens were very pleasant. One of them was also irritating because we couldn’t find the information. Thankfully it was possible to guess it. Or we were lucky. The bonus for the labs required walking to the opposite end again and rummaging at the bottom of a couple of trees, but at least we found it.
What Now?
So by this time it was after 4pm but our event wasn’t until after 6 pm. Realistically, I’d found all of the caches I was likely to find, so we had a bit of a gap. After some wandering around we decided to get dinner early so that we could make a faster exit afterwards.
We found a decent place in the main square to grab a pizza. I politely declined their offer of £10 for a 40cl beer. I’d quite forgotten how expensive it is to buy beer in Sweden when you’re out. It would have been nice, but seriously, £10 ? Never mind.
Eventing
The event we set up was much better attended than the one in Roskilde on Monday. About 6 others came. Most were other Swedish cachers. A couple were local to Lund and the others were from Gothenburg. They were down this way because there was going to be a big event in Malmö on the day after, and that event was reputedly going to publish upwards of 200 new caches. That kind of thing is usually enough to draw a crowd.
So anyway, quite a healthy crowd of us stood in the square outside the cathedral talking about geocaching, events, travel experiences and then latterly some politics. We overran the 45 minutes of event by some way, so it was a good thing that Ami and me had already eaten dinner. That meant when the event was done we could walk straight back to the station and jump on a train home. Except there was a delay on the railway and we had to stand there for 20 minutes.
Once we were on our train, the half hour trip home passed by unnoticed, and we made the epic one-station trip back on the metro and walked home. I think we were back around 9:30 pm. That was enough for the day, to be honest. We’d got a potential monster of a day planned for Thursday, so we just packed it in and grabbed some zzzzzzzzzzzzzz’s.
