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.

The houses at Lalandia are all very new, the block where we stayed (the one furthest away from the central building) cannot be more than two years old. They have not finished the roads yet, nor are the lawns completely grown up.

Everything feels fresh and new, and you cannot complain about the standard of the houses.You have a fully equipped kitchen, as well as a dishwasher and a washing machine – families with children is clearly the target audience. You do need to bring some basic household supplies with you from home, there are no spices, washing powder, or dishwasher tables available in the houses. You have to pay for electricity and water in addition to the basic rent, which feels unnecessarily stingy as the basic rent is pretty high and the cost for utilities ends up being about one or two percent of the cost. I guess it is a way to steer people towards not wasting resources, though.

Lalandia is intended mainly for visitors who come by car. Each house has two parking spaces in front of it, and the idea is clearly that several families can share a house. The smallest houses are sufficient for four adults, we rented a six-person house (which worked well with five adults and two children), and there are also eight-person houses available in a few different styles. Since the place is next door to Billund Airport, you could also fly in, distances are short enough that you don’t really need a car during your stay anyway (you can literally walk from the airport terminal to Lalandia and Legoland). The airport does cause the occasional burst of noise as aircraft take off, but is was not really bothersome while we where there.

Since you are likely to cook most of your food yourself, you also need to go buy it somewhere. There is a somewhat pricey “supermarket” in the main building, which is almost impossible to avoid thanks to its convenient location and good opening hours. Shopping in downtown Billund is about ten minutes walk away, but this being a small town, shop hours are pretty poor, 9-18 or 9-19, shorter on Saturdays and closed (!) on Sundays. This was  a surprise for someone used to Swedish shop hours which tend to be 10-22 all days all weeks. Try to arrive on a weekday, or bring lots of supplies for the first day.

It also seems that Denmark is not quite as credit-card-friendly as other countries. If you use a foreign card, they charge you, the customer, the 2.5 to 3% charge that the credit card company charges the store. This is something I have only seen in very small shops living on tight margins in Sweden, and in the Netherlands. In everyday life, this never happens in Sweden or the US, or in most other countries. The fact that Denmark is outside the Eurozone makes some of these charges possible, since the tougher EU rules against card charges currently only applies to transactions in Euros. To be fair, Lalandia actually has lower credit card charges than other places in Billund.

I read a number of online reviews of Lalandia, and they tended to complain that Denmark is expensive. I can agree, it feels about 20-25% more expensive than Sweden, but it is not astronomical or any worse than downtown München or Paris or London.

Lalandia itself is really not about the houses or the food or credit card charges, though. It is a waterpark, and the hangar-like main building contains the Aquadome, biggest waterpark I have ever seen. It also holds a fairly camp indoor fake Mediterranean town square (with a roof painted like a blue sky), an indoors playground, a gym, and several restaurants (which we never tried). It reminds me of the plastic fake milieus in Disneyland Florida.

The Aquadome is just fantastic! It is claimed to be the biggest water park in Scandinavia, and I can certainly believe that. It is all indoors, except a small section on the outside that you can swim out to from the inside. It has the best water slides I have ever tried, all of which require you to use some form of craft to go down. They also all leave the building and come back in, making for a very dramatic ride. See the picture below for how the water slides protrude from the building. The biggest tube is a water slide where you ride four people at once, on a four-person rubber raft!

There were pools with activities suitable for children as small as one year, and all the way up to those who rather 40 than 4 years old.  Very impressive. You need several visits to explore all the options, and fortunately unlimited access is part of the package with the holiday homes.

It is annoying that they do not allow you to bring your own food inside. Since we have some allergies in the family, it is not that easy to find food that is safe, and we would much prefer to bring our own. Overall, you do get the feeling that they are trying a bit too hard to make you part with your money; it is a bit too aggressive to feel entirely right.

Legoland Denmark is right across the street from Lalandia’s main building, and I will write a separate blog post about that.

A final note is that the ownership structure of Lalandia is interesting. Each house is actually privately owned, and the Lalandia company is just a broker organizing the renting-out of the houses. The are still selling houses, and claim that the yearly cost with mortgages is no higher than the cost of renting for a week. It does look like quite a few Norwegians have taken up on the offer, judging from the large number of expensive cars from Norway we saw parked in front of something like half the houses.

What is striking with the Netherlands is the flatness and wetness of the place. Coming from Sweden where we have huge forest breaking the landscape and a fairly varied topology, the Netherlands certainly feel very different. I think all the canals and other waterways make for very special and  beautiful urban and natural landscapes. In particular, older cities with their integrated waterways are just wonderful. I would love to have a house sitting right on a small canal, with waterbirds and a small boat that you can take downtown to go shopping (not that many Dutch seem to make use of this possibility).

It is also striking how densely populated the country is, and I find the particularly Dutch style of housing quite interesting. Walking through residential areas, you see row upon row of attached row houses. They share some common traits, such as large windows on both front and back and an tendency towards having three floors. Even so, the architecture is very varied, and much more daring than what you tend to find in Sweden. It seems as if the Dutch really like modern architecture, and have done so for a long time, leading to each generation of buildings taking on something new and typical for its time. There is also a tendency (which I guess comes from having a fairly mild climate) to add fun angles and details to building, or to build building as bridges across waterways or with parts jutting out over the surrounding. For a Swede this looks hard to insulate, hard to heat, and terribly impractical if subjected to a cold winter – but it sure looks nice and inviting.

Food is interesting. In the restaurant scene, the Indonesian colonial heritage is ever present, and I really recommend getting a full Rijstafel if you have not already tried it. The fresh produce you get in the stores is certainly fresh, compared to the state of the Dutch vegetables that you find in Sweden (a significant proportion of our vegetables are imported from Holland, especially during the Winter). It is also much cheaper than back here. On the other hand, they have not yet had their “Äkta vara” debate about additives in food. Rather, you find a lot of heavily processed sweet goods in the stores, with no real try to minimize additives and processing. As with most places we go, we brought some food with us back home. In this case, it was “vla“, a kind of creamy yoghurt-like dairy product with flavorings such as caramel, chocolate, and vanilla. It seems to be an industrial product with no real home-made history, but it certainly tastes great. Recommended!

In terms of tips for what to see in the Netherlands, my main tip from this trip has to be Madurodam, a fantastic scale 1:25 miniatures park containing models of many of the most famous buildings in the Netherlands. Our four-year-old just loved it, especially the trains and ships that moved around.  It is not a static display, but it constantly evolves. I had been there once before, at the Euromicro Real-Time Systems Conference in 2001, and they had added and remodeled quite a bit since then.

The Hague as a city was not that impressive, but the government buildings are actually quite fascinating. Lots of high-quality architecture.

We also went to Delft, a classic tourist destination. We did not look at the porcelain factory, but we did take a canal boat tour. There were so many bikes thrown into the canals by drunk students that we almost had to abort the trip because of one that stuck to our boat, but the guide managed to shake it off.

We moved around using trams, buses, and trains, and that worked very well in the actually quite small Hague-Delft area. Apart from poor synchronization between different transport systems (leading to wait times every here and there), it was fairly efficient and simple. Apparently, the roads were totally crowded during the weekend, so public transport was clearly preferable.

On a negative note, restaurants in the Netherlands seem to have a hard time with the concept of lactose intolerance. It was surprisingly difficult in many cases to find some food which they were willing to guarantee as free from milk products (the best approximation across language barriers). In particular, Dutch bread seems to contain milk far more often than one would assume. An utterly bad experience was with the Dakota’s restaurant at Schiphol. They wanted to charge us 12 EUR for a plate of plain pasta with no sauce or anything… needless to say, we refused the offer. If you wanted the 5 EUR childrens’ menu, you had to take a flavored milk drink with it.  Period. No changes possible.

Is the Netherlands or Holland, by the way? Here is the official answer.

Linköping is one of the ten 100k-cities in Sweden (the ten cities with populations of 100000 to 200000, which kind of form a mid-size layer beneath the three major big cities of Malmö, Göteborg, and Stockholm). It is a fast-growing high-tech city with a big university. I think that along with Västerås, it might at some point surpass Uppsala as Sweden’s fourth-largest city. The overall impression is of an optimistic city with a good economy.

On the surface, there did not look like there was that much to do in Linköping, but after a closer look, there are a lot of museums and places that are really very good — especially for a family with small children. The tourist board has a good central information source at visitlinkoping.se, which does list  most interesting things.

Practial notes first. We took the car here (yes I know that driving 300 km is not as nice as taking the train, but considering our baggage load there was not much of an alternative), and noted that parking is very well organized in Linköping, and quite affordable. 24 hours in a parking garage costs only 75 SEK, which is cheap compared to Stockholm or Uppsala. You can also go in and out from the garage during that time, which is excellent!  Driving to Kolmården (which is located almost half-way to Stockholm from Linköping) took about an hour, mostly on the highway (E4). Beware of the traffic on the smaller road connecting the E4 to Kolmården, it can be a pretty long line of family cars in the morning…

What to Do in Linköping

Here are the things that we found, evaluated from the perspective of a family with a four-year old that needs to be entertained.

• Gamla Linköping is an open-air museum area similar to Skansen in Stockholm. You have a lot of old buildings showing how the city looked around 1900. The buildings are inhabited, and most contain activities such as cafes and small museums. There are many small activities for children showing how people lived in past times, including baking in a wood-fired oven and doing the laundry pre-washing-machine.
• Fenomenmagasinet is located at Gamla Linköping, and is a surprisingly large technology hands-on center. Actually, one of the best such I have seen! Particularly attractive was the cockpit section of a SAAB 2000 passenger liner they have, where children can play at being a pilot or passenger.
• Next to Gamla Linköping there is Valla, which has a very large and imaginative playground, as well as some more museums. For a someone with an interest in the history of technology, there is small train museum (about narrow-gauge railroads) and a tractor museum that I found fascinating. Do take the silly little “train” between Gamla Linköping and Valla, our four-year old loved that part!
• Busfabriken was another hit! It is a very large indoors playground that makes the stuff we have back home in Uppsala pale in comparison.
• Unfortunately, the main reason that I wanted to go to Linköping turned out to be closed for renovation. The Swedish Airforce Museum is closed from early 2009, and won’t open until June of 2010. I guess I should have checked this before we went here… but it is not like this was the only time in history that I will come by Linköping. Better luck next year, I guess.
• Shopping is decent in Linköping, since there is no other big city close by to “steal” the niche stores (like Stockholm does for Uppsala). In particular, I recommend going to Norins Ost for some good cheese.
• We did not visit the facilities around the great Swedish canal works, Göta Kanal. Apparently, Bergs slussar is a good destination around a set of canal locks. You can take a boat trip along Kinda kanal as well, but we did not try that either.

Kolmården

Kolmården is the biggest zoo in Sweden, and of the top tourist destinations in Sweden overall. The overall environment is quite interesting: it is very hilly, so expect to push strollers up and down fairly steep inclines. It is also embedded in a large forest, and thus nice and shady even on the warmest sunny summer days.  Good shoes are recommended!

It is based on the display of interesting animals, split into sections with often English-language names like “Marine World” and ”Tiger World”. There are elephants, tigers, snow leopards, dolphins, penguins, camels, gorillas, schimpanzees, etc. The dolphin show in the Marine World felt a bit cheeky at times (unnecessary pirate interlude, not to mention a video presentation with Markoolio), but the dolphins themselves were great! Do spend the extra 20 SEK/person to pre-book (over the Internet) seats for the show you want to see. It will save you literally hours standing in line for the show and guarantee very good seats.

In addition, there are three major play grounds for children: Bamses Värld, for those who love Bamse, Kulmården for small children, and Wild Park for children around eight-nine. Wild Park has some really cool things, like a super-high slide and a mine where you can crawl and walk through.

Overall, it feels like seven years or older is optimal for this destination, smaller children will not understand most of the attempts to inform about animals, their habitats, and preservation, nor will they be able to really enjoy the play grounds. There is an emphasis on teaching visitors about endangered animals and various preservations programs that Kolmården is part of running (and a discrete invitation to contribute money directly).

One recommendation is to start the day by taking out a day-pass for the cabin cars connecting the opposite corners of the park. It is quite a relaxing time to make a circuit around the park in a cabin car, and it offers the fastest way to get to the Marine World from the entrance.

Prices inside the park are decent as far as parks go, about 18 SEK for a coffee, 80-100 SEK for a real meal. 20-30 SEK for an icecream. The small rollercoaster is a total rip-off at 40 SEK/person including children.

There is also a “Safari Park” where you can drive your own car through a safari land with wild African animals. We did not try that.

Summary

Vacationing around Linköping is not a bad idea at all, and we did not have time to visit all the fun things there are to see.

I lived here for a year back in 1989-1990, and went to school at the now closed Keflavík US Naval Air Station. I also worked here in the summers of 1990, 1992, 1993, and 1994. So it is fifteen years since I last visited Iceland, and this place has certainly changed.

The recent economic turmoil that hit Iceland hard is visible if you look closely. There are fewer people in the expensive shops, more in the cheaper ones. Lots of construction projects seem abandoned. However, the overall impression is that so much has changed for the better during the boom times of the past fifteen years, and apparently much of it in even the last five years according to my parents who last visited Iceland then.

Thanks to the drastic fall of the Icelandic Króna, Iceland feels decently affordable today, even for a Swede whose SEK currency has taken a bad beating in 2008 and 2009. Last year, when the ISK was at twice its current value against the SEK, it would have been killingly expensive, like Norway or Switzerland are. But today, the overall impression is that Iceland is a relative bargain, and that this is the best time in a long time to visit Iceland!

So what is the impression?

The roads are much better than they were in 1994, both inside and outside of Reykjavik. There are even multiple-lane highways in some places! Driving feels much more comfortable and safe and fast.

The food has improved radically! Eating out here used to be very expensive and mostly of dubious quality. Now, however, all restaurants we have visited serve more than decent food and quite reasonable prices. The shops carry a large selection of food stuffs from Europe and America, and it is not too unlike home. Imported things are sometimes quite expensive, but nothing too bad.

Update! Something that really stands out is the great value of fish in the fish markets in Reykjavik. For the same price as really cheap meat in other parts of Europe you can get incredible fresh fish, and if you can cook yourself there is no reason not to eat fish for all meals during a stay in Iceland. I am also singularly impressed by the bakeries in Iceland, which compare favorably both to Germany and France, my two best bread nations so far.

There has been a boom in services. Finding somewhere to have even a simple coffee while traveling outside of Reykjavik tended to require careful planning. Now, there are little Kafístofur (sorry for clobbering the language) everywhere. The new visitors’ centers at the big tourist destinations like Þingvellir, Geysir, and Gullfoss are quite impressive. Especially Geysir had a food court and very nice restaurant, where there used to be pretty much nothing. Update! The only poor experience we had was at Fosshotel Reykholt, which featured very slow service and a bad case of overpricing.

Construction was a big part of the overspend in Iceland, and that is very evident as you travel east from Reykjavík: the countryside that used to be empty is now dotted with summer houses, some of them pretty impressively large. They are also made from all-imported wood, which used to be rare as indigenous concrete was cheaper and more durable. Inside Reykjavik, construction has been rampant, with large bodies of new housing, often very nicely done. Many older houses have been renovated, for an overall much classier look to the city than what I recall.

The car pool also shows the effect of a big boom. Where there used to be a predominance of horrible 1980′s US cars and small Japanese cars, there are now a plethora of expensive Audis, Volvos, and Mercedes cars. A marked difference, making it look much more like Sweden or modern America than the Iceland of old.

Update! I do have some late-breaking negative points to bring up as well. If you can avoid it, do not rent a car in Iceland. The prices are horrendous, and they seem to be trying to fool you into paying for scratches and dents already present on the vehicles when you rent them. Instead, if you are a small group, go and rent a bus with a driver. More fun, more convenient, and much cheaper. Plus you get to enjoy the company of a local driver and guide.

Some things are the same, though. The hot water smells faintly of sulphur, which brings back memories 0f times past every time I need hot water. The pools are still heated outdoors pools mostly. The peculiar charm of going swimming outdoors when it is plus five degrees and a drizzle in the air (like it was this morning), but thirty degrees in the water, remains. Icelanders are as generous and funny as always. Energy in the form of heat and electricity are still cheap.

Overall, the “new” Iceland feels much more cosmopolitan and like any other world city in terms of what you can expect in terms of services and availability. I think that is for the better.

Now, how Iceland will get out of the current economic crisis is a different thing, but going here as a tourist is sure to help. It is a great experience, and the prices are nice now!

Getting there, however, was less pleasant than it could have been, thanks to Tallink where we booked the trip and the hotel nights in Pärnu.

When we booked the trip, they told us that there were convenient buses from Tallinn to Pärnu, and that we did not need to bring a car. They also booked us on a nice brand-new integrated hotel containing a “water land” and spa services, and being located very close to the beach. Sounded perfect.

As it turned out, some of these things fell through:

• The buses to Pärnu left from the central bus station in Tallinn, which is not close to the docks where the ferries arrive, but rather some kilometers away. It would have been nice if this had been clear from the start. Instead, Tallink representatives and information made sound as if the buses left directly from the docks, or at least in some place very close by.
• The staff on the ferry to Tallinn did not know about the direct local buses from the docks to the central bus station (a tip: it is bus number 2, which stops right outside of terminal D. Or walk some more and take tram number 2). They gave us confused and incorrect information as how to get to the bus station. At least they told us where the bus station was…
• At the last minute (one day before departure) it turned out that our main hotel was overbooked and that we would be given a different hotel. After some discussions they also promised us entrance tickets to the water land in our booked hotel. However, it was not clear how this was to work out in practice. Or if our new hotel was any better or worse than the one we were booked on initially. Customer service gave the impression that all would be handled at check-in in their terminal in Stockholm.
• When we checked in in Stockholm, we did get hotel vouchers for the replacement hotel. But for a double room, not the suite that was what they had said initially. And the check-in personell had no idea about the entrance tickets to the water land. “there is no note of that in the computer system”. We got to talk to a supervisor who told us that things should work out, wrote a note to the hotel on a copy of our booking, and had the good sense to give us a name and phone number to call would they not.
• Once we arrive in Pärnu, the hotel that we were staying at did provide an envelope containing the tickets to the water land that we needed. The hotel was also recently renovated and very fresh (it was the St. Petersburg hotel, in a carefully renovated 16th-17th-century building in downtown Pärnu). The location was more convenient for eating out and shopping, if a bit more removed from the beach (20 minutes walk rather than five).

Thus, in the end, things worked out and we got decent value for our money. Even so, it is still annoying how Tallink handled things, especially since the fixes are mostly in precision of communication and should actually be cheaper for them to do right.

So how could Tallink have done better in our case (and quite probably in general):

• Run their own bus shuttle from Tallink to Pärnu and other interesting destinations. They do that in Sweden, so why not in Estonia? We would have been happy to pay some extra for a bus conveniently arriving at the docks to take us straight to the destination.
• Present correct and complete facts about each destination on the phone and on their homepage. If they refer people to the bus service to Pärnu, do provide a time-table, a map on how to get to the main bus station, and a map of the end location to help you find your hotel. After all, Tallink have local staff in Tallinn that can easily find out for you.
• Have their customer service staff be precise and clear. In the end, things did work out and we were not cheated of our vacation. But the details like the standard of our replacement hotel, how the water land tickets would work, and similar simple things could have been clearly communicated from the start. That would have saved them lots of phone service time, and us a bunch of unnecessary annoyment and anxiety.

Finally, the main drawback of a trip of this type where you spend a night on the ferry each way is that the ferry trip takes a lot of time from the vacation. This would not be so bad if it was enjoyable time, and they are trying to give off the impression that it is kind of a luxurious experience to travel on their modern ferries to Tallinn. And mostly it is nice. Going on a ship where you can walk around and have lots of space is vastly superior to inhuman modes of transport like long-distance air travel or car trips. For the kids, having a dedicated playroom is great.

But since the length of the trip makes it necessary to eat dinner and breakfast onboard, the food is quite a important component. And here Tallink and most other Baltic ferries I have tried fall down by simply providing fairly taste-less and disappointing fare. The tradition of a grand buffet is great in principle, but something makes it so that each course is cheapened down to its simplest least tasty version. Creating a rather disappointing experience overall. And there is no indication that the a la carte restaurants are any better. So for now, you eat because you have to and not as much because you enjoy it.

Why this is the case, I don’t know. Either they think their customers do not care or cannot tell a good meal from a poor one, or they lack pride in the kitchen, or they are saving money by using the cheapest stuff they can get away with, or something else.