First, a note on the title. Thank you all for your help! However, the winner, "Nordic Nomads", was already taken....as was "Nordic Notes", and several other options. Hence the Swenglish "Nomads i Norden". Lars and I speak Swenglish much of the time, anyway. "Norden" is the Swedish word for what we call "the Nordic Countries"--the 3 Scandinavian countries + Finland, Åland, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Svalbard--your geography lesson for today.
We head off in 2 weeks, so most of the preparations have been done. The Icelandic part of the trip was booked through a travel firm, Nordic Visitor. THAT part was easy! You can preview our trip on their website: http://iceland.nordicvisitor.com/travel-deals/self-drive-tours/iceland-grand-tour/181/
We'll have a week in Norway between Iceland and Sweden--partly in Bergen and partly with my friends Roald and Jorunn on the Hardanger fjord. Then the train to Stockholm. That part wasn't too hard to schedule, either.
Sweden was also easy, as I've been there several times. We'll be staying with friends in Stockholm for a week of "doing nothing", and then four days on the island of Gotland, a medieval trade center and the site of the first known representation of a nyckelharpa, carved onto a church lintel in 1350. Then I'll be taking the nyckelharpa course at Ekebyholm, while Lars and our friends Ami and Gus visit the famous Falun copper mine farther north.
The tricky part came with the Toskedal's lovely invitation to join them for 5 days in a "rorbu" (fisherman's cottage) in the Lofoten Islands. This lies above the Arctic Circle, and coincides neatly with Lars' desire to re-visit Gällivare and Jokkmokk in Sweden's Lappland. However, Norwegian is just different enough from Swedish that reading timetables becomes rather a chore. And buses and trains don't run very often, or don't connect, or (truly annoying) don't publish timetables very far in advance. Jorunn finally came to my rescue and called the bus company in Nordland to find out times and prices. It's good to have friends!
So the last part of the trip is: 5 days in Lofoten, bus to Narvik, rent a car and drive to Björkliden (Sweden), spend a day hiking in Abisko National Park, drive to Jokkmokk and the Saami Museum, drive back to Narvik, bus to Bodø, train to Trondheim and Oslo, then "Norway in a Nutshell"...a combined train-and-boat tour that will take us back to Bergen, with a stopover in Flåm.
Some of the last part of our trip came about because a couple of years ago, Ami and Gus sent Lars a book for Christmas, Jan Guillou's Brobyggarna (The Bridge-Builders), a historical novel about the building of the Bergen Railway. So of course, now we have to go see it for ourselves. I've taken it once, but was looking at the scenery, rather than the bridges and tunnels. Silly me.
