From Östra Nedsjön lake, some people decided to change our original route along the train line Borås–Göteborg and instead divert north via Floda and then Gråbo. It had turned out that for the children cycling themselves, any amount of car traffic was making the ride harder. Staying motivated the whole way was already a struggle, and when the route was not so beautiful and adventurous, when they had to cycle in a straight line, when they couldn’t spontaneously stop to pick some berries that they had spotted on the side of the road, motivation was even lower. The rural roads and tracks that the group had found as an alternative in the previous days were beautiful, but they went up and down all day, sometimes very steep, sometimes with gravel, making the ride exhausting for everyone even at only 15 km a day. As a better alternative, we would be able to join a regional bicycle route in Floda that would turn onto a national cycle route on a former train line in Gråbo, meaning a smooth ride with very soft ascents and descents.
One of our goals for the Childish Weeks had been to follow a train line so that children could skip part of the way by train if they were tired. I think we had not thought this completely through. While it was useful to follow the train to allow people joining and leaving, trains stop in populated areas, which is where we don’t sleep, so the tired children would still have to cycle a long way from the station to the sleeping place. With a distance of 5–25 km between individual stations and only 3 trains a day, this line is also generally not suitable for skipping parts of the way at daily distances of only 15 km. With this in mind it was okay that the group diverted from the original route, also because it would pass another train line in Floda.
While the previous days had been quite sunny and comfortable during the day, this day was grey with occasional rainfall, but fortunately not too cold. Towards the afternoon it turned sunny again. We cycled through forests and pastures and a very rural countryside to our destination for the day, Uspen lake just south of Floda.
We camped on a meadow right on the edge of a very long but narrow sandy beach. The entrance to the lake was sandy and so shallow that even 20 meters in you still had only your feet in the water. It was a paradise for the Swedish children in our group who seemed to enjoy playing in the water at any temperature and in any weather. Our meadow was surrounded by cow pastures, and occasionally some cows would come to the fence to greet us with a moo, which was reciprocated by some of our children. Our spot was also directly under the landing route of Göteborg airport, so airplanes were flying very low over us every few minutes, to the great amazement of the toddler in our group. Nearby, some kind of German children’s festival played cheesy 90s music that very loudly echoed over the lake, but at sunset the whole environment suddenly turned dead quiet, apart from an occasional overflight.
The next day the weather unfortunately turned even worse. It was now also cold and windy, and heavy rainfalls happened suddenly at random times throughout the day. While we soon reached the former train line and could cycle without cars in a completely straight and flat line, it was not making things any easier because of the strong head winds. You could feel that the mood in the group was really low. Now reaching the more populated outskirts of Göteborg, it was also our first sleeping place without a lake.
There were interesting things to discover anyways. The sleeping place was an overgrown meadow with a small patch of abandoned asphalt surrounded all the way by an artificial hill full of dense forest, forming sort of a crater. This might have been a former military training site. In the forest, a collapsed underground structure (possibly a bunker) formed deep holes in random places. Mysterious things were sticking out of the ground or lying around throughout the place.
A spontaneous heavy discussion about a topic related to our values took place in the evening that could only be resolved with a compromise unsatisfactory for both sides and left some people hurt and disappointed. Fortunately, the mood was brightened by a fairy tale told around the camp fire about a farmer who found a UFO in the forest, followed by a night walk to that UFO that turned out to be some abandoned concrete mixers.
The next day was a very smooth ride on the former train line until Göteborg. After 25 km had turned out to be way too much on our first cycling day of the Childish Weeks, the daily distances had been 15 km until now. Today we would have to do 30 km, although with barely any ascents. Since some children had already left again, 5 children aged 4–13 were now participating on their own bikes (the youngest one sometimes gets attached to their parent’s bike) and one toddler aged 2 on a bike seat. The children had become more accustomed to the distance, and occasional treasures of sweets and other things hidden along the way with hints written on the road helped with the motivation to go on. They managed to cycle the distance impressively well. Unfortunately, a long and exhausting uphill awaited everyone at the very end to reach our sleeping place for Göteborg.