Day 27 – Happy Easter! – 28 March

We are now on weather holding in Ljunghusen. The forecast promise an opening on Friday, so we hope to make another 40 km that day, aiming at Abbekås. Thereafter the weather, again, will be challenging.

We have been slow on reporting the last few days; let us make a quick review.

When we were in Humlebäk last Thursday, Steins performance started to fell, as his stomach was not at all cooperating. On Saturday he had to contact the Danish Health Care system, where he was well received by Rikke and got a liter of reinforcement straight into his veins at Bispebjerg Hospital. Thereafter Stein was picked up by his sister, Nina and brother in law, Carsten, and we all had a great lunch at our hotel. Stein, still low on energy went to our room, while Erling later took part in Nora’s farewell party (She is going to Tanzania). Due to Stein’s condition, we decided to stay another day.

Sunday morning we had a cup of coffee with Stein’s old friend, Claus, who also had arranged the storage of our kayaks with Henrik. After a tour of central Copenhagen, we had an Italian farewell dinner with Erling’s two daughters.

Monday 0700, Stein was back in business and keen to carry on. We took a taxi to the storage and we were on the water at 1030, ready for a long day on the water. Stein enjoyed the kayaking out of Copenhagen a lot better than the kayaking into Copenhagen on Friday.

We took a quick break at the end of Kastrup runway before we crossed over Öresund back to Sweden. The current was quite interesting on the last part. We paddled in a 45 degree on the current and had an average speed on 7-8 km/hr. If we had been heading for Helsingborg, it had been possible to water-ski after us. During the day, the current shifted back and forth, but we were quite happy with the total distance and average speed.

We are sorry for the problems with the tracker. We hope to have fixed it now.

We had a horrible weather forecast in front of us, so Karianne had booked the Lotsvillaen Vandrarhem to us. Almost new, balcony door to the kayaks, and excellent in all other ways. On Monday we just made it to the grocery, and had beer and steak for dinner.

We have taken a lot of videos, but we have not been able to transfer it to our back-office due to the need of access to computers and real broadband. The combination of these two have been hard to achieve. So today, Wednesday we traveled to the city library of Malmö in the hope of being able to send the files to the back-office, so they can make it available for our followers. As we speak, it looks promising.

We have had some equipment related and quite time-consuming issues, we have been working with for a while, but we hope to have closed it now. Fingers crossed.

After a careful consideration before we started out from Oslo 2 March, we decided to use the Olympus Though 5 camera. All pictures in the blog have been taken with the Olympus. Stein’s camera broke down. The service from Olympus Norway exceeded all expectations. Within hours after the company was aware of our problem, a new camera was on its way!

Tomorrow, Thursday, we will have another holding day in gale force winds and snow. Erling has been speaking about 24th of March last year when his eldest son turned 30, and the temperature was 20 degrees and the champagne was drunk on the terrace in short sleeves… It is safe to say this year has been different.

We have soon been on the water for four weeks, and we are still very good friends, and have been able to enjoy the adventure as it unfolds, see https://therussian-scandinaviankayakexpedition.com/about/