Trollhätten

Trollhätten was an interesting spot.

 Apart from the bronze age burial mound, they have a very pretty city with many flowers in the public parks and the houses alike.

Through the city runs the river and canal, which is a major shipping channel. Unfortunately we didn't see any of the major boats passing through ( there were none today).

We did spend quite a bit of time at the series of 3 locks. There have been three different lock groups built to drop or raise the boats travelling along the canal over the last 200 years.  Remnants remain of both earlier versions. These have needed to be rebuilt over the years due to increasing sizes of boats and can  now take a 4000 ton boat ( enough to hold 135 trucks with trailers).

The lock area is very pretty, with beautiful flower strewn fields rolling down to the waters edge,  and we joined in a free tour to hear the history, then watched the traffic in the lock a little more, while we enjoyed the famous prawns on rolls at overlooking heritage listed local cafe.

There are some great vantage points around town to watch the river from, so we took in some scenic views, and then made sure we were in a good position for 3pm when a major water release of 300,000litres of water per second is released from the river upstream ( purely for tourists to view) - which turns an almost dry area of granite rock to the side of the main watercourse into a frothing, spectacular waterfall for about 10 minutes.   This section passes the 2 hydro electric stations for the town -one of which was the subject of our next tour.

With our education completed for the day we headed out of town and took some more of the roads less traveled. A fruitless search for a bottle of wine created some interesting detours and exchanges with strangers, but did not produce the goods. Apparently only quite large places are supplied with a shop which sells alcohol, and these are all owned by the government.  An excellent way to cut down on consumption you would think. It did mean that we drove the last few km on forest roads, which were very narrow and scenic. 

Our first airbnb accommodation-a room in the house of Ulf, is situated on the outskirts of a 50 person town about half a hour north west of Gothenburg. Amusingly, Ulf had decided that instead of a grill he would feed us shrimp for tea-so we have had two meals today of prawns on bread!!!  He is an ex-teacher who rents out his spare space now that the kids have left home, and saves the money to finance overseas travels. 

There are apparently Elk in the forest nearby,  but we failed to catch sight  of any when we went out for a stroll at about 9.15 pm.   We did actually see a sunset for the first time since arriving in Scandinavia though. 

I took lots of photos today, but sadly the Internet is letting us down, so you will have to make do with text. Hopefully will put up some catch up photos in the next few days.

For those who are interested-our first taste of orienteering in Sweden will start tomorrow, with the model event for the sprint. Sadly the weatherman says that this will coincide with rainy weather for most of the week  so we might have a lot of clothes washing and drying to do in the next few days.