We were heading south again, my perfectionist-planning-nerves were barely surviving the fact that we were not able to plan our trip otherwise. We headed north, to then go south, then north again and finally south back home. This meant that we would pass through more or less the same places several times, we were wasting fuel, the environment, time, well everything! This time we were going to Sponvika in Norway, to stay with some friends in a summer house they had rented for a week. From Gävunda we took the E45 and headed towards Sunne, where we would spend one night, the road displayed a beautiful scenery.
When I think of Sunne, I remember the ski-day-trips we took there with school when I was a child, apart from that there isn’t much more that comes to mind. This was about to change drastically, since Sunne became for me one of those places were all things beautiful and interesting came together. We had read in our guide-book about the great writer Selma Lagerlöf‘s childhood home, Mårbacka, just outside of Sunne, it was interesting enough and right on our way to Sponvika, so we decided to stop here. First, we wanted to find a cozy and calm place to stay the night, again our guide-book, suggested a place a few kilometers north of Sunne called Länsmansgården, the place and some historical figures that used to live in it figured in the famous novel by Selma Lagerlöf called Gösta Berlings Saga.
We got the last available room, ate some lunch and took a few hours of rest in the room. In the afternoon we took a stroll around the area and headed down to the river with our mate and enjoyed the beautiful landscape and the tranquil atmosphere drinking it on the docks. We had a pretty fancy dinner at the hotel restaurant before we hit the sack.
The next morning we felt pretty refreshed and rested, so we got up early and drove to Mårbacka, the former estate of Selma Lagerlöf. We payed to join the guided tour of the mansion, where we were not allowed to take any photographs. I must admit I had a pretty skewed image of Selma Lagerlöf, I had read some parts of her novels while in school, but had no real knowledge about her works and her life. To me she was this cozy old lady that figured in our 20 kr bill and who was the first woman to win the Nobel prize in literature. The tour was great and we learned that Lagerlöf had been a radical feminist and had worked pretty hard for women’s suffrage in Sweden. She was pretty ambitious, hard working and accomplished a lot of things during her long life, she was also a businesswoman and she had a pension and a health insurance system for her employees. I felt pretty inspired by this intelligent and creative woman!
After the tour we strolled in the garden, bought a ton of books in the book-store and had the famous “Mårbacka”-cake at the coffee-shop. Around lunch we were on our way to Sponvika, Norway.
It was much later, after our stay in Norway and Östersund in the north of Sweden, that we once more passed through Sunne, on our way home to Gothenburg. We decided to book a room at Länsmansgården, we had a lovely stay this time too, but the area had been struck by a storm. Huge trees had fallen and destroyed power cables leaving several homes without electricity, as well as our hotel.