Allmansratten = Swedish word / concept meaning "all man's right" to the land. This means you can walk, cycle, ride, ski, and camp on any land except private gardens and certain restricted spots.
In planning our trip to Sweden, I thought this was so cool and something we could also do to save some money - just camp wherever! Take our tent and sleeping gear and just sleep wherever, for free!
I had left two nights in our itinerary, right after our kayaking trip, to camp wherever we felt like it. But even before the kayaking trip started, we needed to store some of our luggage that wasn't going to come with us in Stockholm, so it made way more sense to stay in Stockholm in our same hotel/hostel the night the kayaking trip ended.
I spent a while stressing about where we might camp the next night. Ideally I wanted to find some lovely quiet lake-front forest or park between Stockholm and Goteborg (our next city destination) and camp there for the night. But the reality of this proved tricky. We didn't have a car. So I was trying to imagine us all catching the train to a small stop somewhere, getting off with all of our stuff, and then walking for a while until we found a nice spot and set up.
Imagine your own town, wherever you live, and think about arriving at a main train or bus station and getting off with a huge pack on your back and a little one on your front and using your feet to then start walking somewhere and hoping to find a place to camp. Maybe it's possible... but I couldn't figure out how to do it comfortably.
There are private campgrounds with nice facilities here and there, but in the end I decided that we should just catch one train straight to Goteborg and spend 3 nights there in our hostel. Scrap the camping as it was too much to figure out with transit and lots of stuff.
Now if we had a car, it would be a totally different situation. I can see that driving around Sweden with a tent and camping gear and just camping wherever here and there - that would be totally awesome.
I was disappointed not to take advantage of this "Allmansratten" in Sweden (unless you count the 2 nights camping on islands with our kayaks in the Archipelago). But the other thing is that we are getting tired. When we finished the kayaking trip, we wanted clean clothes and beds and good sleep. We had almost no clean laundry and most of our stuff was damp.
So boarding the train for Goteborg, the thing I was probably looking forward to the most was some down time and an opportunity to do laundry!
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| Walking >1km from our hostel to the Stockholm central train station |
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| Waiting in the Stockholm station with all of our bags |
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| Ava helps buy some breakfast for the train ride at the grocery store in the station |
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| Arriving in Goteborg - almost at our hostel |
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| Up the stairs to our hostel as we arrive |
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