The big activity that is being pushed by the ski resorts for Summer is biking. Lindvallen as well as most of the other resorts around the area have a “bike park”, some cross-country trails, and a set of downhill tracks of varying difficulty. The business idea is clearly to use ski lifts to bring bikers up to the top, and then have them bike downhill. In this way, you can reuse the existing infrastructure for an extra season There were quite a few bikers making use of the opportunity when we visited.

Downhill biking is not really my thing though. I prefer exercising on the bike on forest trails or regular roads but not racing down steep inclines. If you ignore the downhill option, there was still a lot of opportunity for biking in the woods and otherwise around the area. Some not-to-well-marked tracks are available. I did not really see anyone use these tracks and trails, it really seems that downhill is where the focus of the guests is.

There is also a small practice park (kid’s bike park) with some simple jumps and obstacles, and my preschool-age kids found this quite a bit of fun on their regular bikes. It is good practice for terrain and downhill biking too, and it was pretty busy at times.

You can also use the lifts to get up to the top in order to take a short hike or just have a coffee or lunch in the “Snögubben” restaurant. You can also take the lift down again, and my kids loved riding the lift up and down taking in the view. A bit like a slow-motion amusement park ride, I guess. In the Summer, you can even just keep going without getting off at the top – you would not be allowed to do that in the Winter.

The biggest attraction for Summertime use in Lindvallen is the Experium water land. It cannot compare to Lalandia in Denmark, but it is big enough to keep the family happy for a few days of visits. The water slides were appreciated by my three-year-old and six-year-old, but could have been a tad steeper and faster. Fun, but not exhilarating like the ones at Lalandia. It did get pretty crowded on a day with bad weather, so it might be smart to go there on a day when the weather is nice (and everyone else is taking the chance for outdoors activities).

We chose to rent an apartment for a week. Apartments or entire houses seem to be the most common form of accommodation, and the apartment was fully furnished and we could run our own household for the week. Everything is clean, well-kept, and modern. You can tell that Lindvallen is a booming place.

Off-Season and Backstage

The place was definitely off-season. While there was a significant number of people around and the car park in from of Experium did get pretty full, it was clear that you have ten times more people around in the Winter. This is also reflected in pricing: it seems that Summer is about one third to one fourth the price of Winter season, depending on precisely which week you compare to. Very reasonable.

Still, a surprising number of restaurants and cafes were open, but the ones close to the ski slopes were all closed. Lindvallen features a normal ICA shop, but it had closed some sections and was not as richly stocked as it would be in wintertime. There is a better selection of groceries in the shops down in the main village of Sälen – but that is some 5 km away by car, and really not necessary for most needs.

The staff at Lindvallen was very friendly and definitely relaxed thanks to the low customer pressure. It seemed that they let things pass that would not be accepted in Winter. In contrast to last year’s vacation in Denmark, the occasional broken glass in the apartment we rented was no big deal. It was almost too relaxed at times, feeling a bit disorganized, and that they let some small problems with the houses pass for fixing later.

I got a feeling of being “backstage” at a show, seeing how things really work. In the Summer, you can walk around and look at the lifts without snow and crowds being in the way. At the edges of the area, there are parking lots full of ramps (for snowboarders) to be deployed in the slopes and snow groomers resting until the season starts.

Here we see the base station for a small lift, with the machines that are used to check the ski passes of the skiers covered up and the T-bars removed. It is not very distinct here, but lots of the equipment sat on raised platforms to become level with the “ground” once half a meter of snow or so has fallen.

They did not take down the signs used in Winter either. There were advertisements reminding you to check your skis along the lift tracks, and the signs like this one showing where the ski school gathers:

It all just feels a bit off. But off in a nice way.

Off-Off-Topic: Skistar

For full disclosure, I should note that I am a shareholder in Skistar, the company that runs most of the places in Sälen as well as several other skiing destinations in Sweden. Skistar is a fun company actually, and they even run their yearly shareholder meeting in one of their resorts with a special rate for share holders who attend. If you buy a lot of stock, you also get a discount on vacations – but you need a very large family or to be a busy winter sports addict to turn a profit on that discount.

Actually, the Chariot company calls the device we have an “infant sling“, and in function, it is very close to how a baby seat for a car works. The baby is secured by a harness, and sits in a suspended seat that absorbs bumps in the road and keeps her above the somewhat cold seat (we have had one of the best long winters in a long time here, it is still around zero Celcius at the time of writing, and we have about a decimeter of snow out in the garden).

Installing it required some physical force, as apparently the carrier had warped some since we bought it. There were also a fair number of threadings of various cords in very particular patterns. It took a couple of hours in the end (somewhat due to the help I got from the big brother of the baby in question). The result looks like this:

We have used it a few times now, and the baby seems to be accepting it just as much as the regular stroller or car seat. Since it is forward-facing, it is best if big brother is there to keep her company. The general rule that we have learnt is that up to about a year of age, children should be facing their parent when taken for a ride. But an elder sibling seems to be a perfectly acceptable replacement.

On the Chariot site there is a note about not using this seat for biking — but what is the point of it then? We will use it for short trips, so I think there is no harm here.

Anyway, it is a highly recommended item.

The bike light

When I got my new bike, I was told that the lights on it were automatic. So they would turn on when it was dark. That was understandable and useful enough for the front light which runs off of a generator. But for the battery-powered read light it seemed completely stupid. So it would detect “hey it is dark” and turn on during all dark hours, quickly running out of batteries. Or so I thought. Initial tests of the auto function did indicate this. The light turned on immediately when set to “auto”. However, when I asked the people in the store where I got it, they told me that it also had a shake sensor. So when I just waited some 30 seconds after the bike was stopped and still, and in the dark, the light did turn off. Impressive, in all its simplicity! There has to be some little eight-bit machine in there to do this… I guess.

The bar code scanner

Also known as the “Motorola MC17 Retail Mobile Computer”, which is one of the gadgets you use to scan your shopping yourself. This generation of devices, with fancy colored screens, have just been put into use in my two local supermarkets. I have managed to crash a few of the previous generations of devices (a small child that bites or licks the machine is apparently not within spec), and then I always had to go to customer service and get a new one. They would manually tell the central computer that my shopping was now done on a different device. Obviously, these systems are based on a central computer that tracks what all customers have scanned, and all prices. Before I realized this I was a little curious how all of that data could fit into each little device.

Anyway, one of the MC17s crashed on me the other day in the store, without any interference on my part (or my son’s). But unlike the previous devices, this one then cleanly rebooted, came up — and presented me with my shopping again! So they have managed to add just a bit of robustness to the system. Which did impress me some, based on previous experience.

Conclusion

So score two for the good guys, I must admit that there are things out there that just do work, even when sceptical not-so-old curmudgeon like me thinks they are just ripe to fail in some way.

One thing that has always annoyed me is that you seemed to have to have a tow bar (dragkrok in Swedish) on your car to be able to fit a bike mount. And tow bars are not that common, there are several good reasons not to get one, like added cost, not usually available on used cars, and that they compromise crash safety to some extent. But to put my bike on a car it seemed that I had to get one. I was thinking about how to build a bike mount that could actually work on a regular station wagon by making use of the cargo rails, in some clever way.

But it seems I do not have to invent and build and market this thing myself: it is already available! I found a whole set of varieties from a company called Thule when I browsed a biking catalogue recently. Seems to fit quite a few varieties of cars including even the odd sedan! Good to know that they exist if I ever need to carry bikes regularly.

Why is this ability to bike and have a stroller with us liberating? The alternatives to getting down town are:

• Walking with a stroller, which while nice on a summer’s day takes about half an hour each way. So it does not lend itself to casual and quick trips.
• Taking the bus, which means keeping to a schedule.
• Taking the car, which is infinite pain in having to getting the thing out of the garage, loading it up with stroller and child, parking it and paying the 10 SEK/2 USD/hour parking rates (or higher) we thankfully have here in Uppsala. No to mention feeling bad for the environment all the time.

Biking is the perfect mode of transportation in my opinion: fast enough to get you where you want to be, a bike is easy to park compared to everything else, and you get exercise as a free bonus!

So what are the best things about our carrier?

• That it is both a stroller and a bike attachment
• It keeps nice and cozy inside even in the worst cold rain or winter days
• It can also be turned into a jogging stroller or even put on skis!
• As a stroller, it turns on a dime
• Attached to the bike, it rolls very easy, I actually think I am faster with the carrier than with a child seat thanks to the large wheels and good distribution of weight.

What are the worst parts?

• It is a bit big, close to a meter wide, and there are some shops you cannot get inside since it is wider than standard doors (and that goes for the city library too). It does not fit in regular escalators.
• It is pretty poor as a cargo trailer: classic simple trailers have a flat deck made from wood, which means you can just pile on the load. This thing puts all the load on the seat in the middle, so you have take heavy grocery bags and buckle them up in order to get them on the point that can reliably take 45kg of weight.
• Their silly Americanized advertising that is just full of ridiculously fit beautiful young parents biking, jogging, or even going mountain biking with these trailers. That just feels dumb and probably does not correspond to how most of their actual customers look.
• The color scheme could do some with some more interesting colors like grey, black, yellow, orange, anything. The blue/white/red scheme looks a bit old-fashioned (just look at what strollers do with their color schemes):

To get back why I should get a commission on these things: the Corsaire is a real talking piece as you move around town with it: almost every day someone asks we what it is, how good it is, where you can buy one, and how much they cost. I guess that’s why ideas like Amazon’s referral system might actually work on the Internet.

Seems that carriers are coming into vogue these days (along with Christiania bikes). Never saw one when I came to town in 1992. So we ended on a meaningless observation from Uppsala about the nature of the bike population of town.