Author: Ecotopia Biketour 2015

A thank you note

This is a lengthy goodbye letter that I hadn’t had time to write before I left the tour and a thank you note that has been brewing in my head for the last two months and now it has turned into an account of how I felt during and after the bike tour. I didn’t get enough of Ecotopia goodness and the regret over the fact that I could have stayed longer and didn’t, still haunts me. I have no photos to accompany the text but following Charlie’s blog post I’ll attach a song too – one that’s way more…

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Alingsås transition initiative

The end of July is approaching, and the biketour 2015 has been on the road for about 6 weeks already! This weekend we have been staying at a private family farm near Alingsås, south-central Sweden (http://ostangsgard.se/) This family moved from a nearby town to the countryside 8 months ago, and bought a farm. Their farm is part of the transitive initiatives network (http://alingsås.omställning.net/) – a network of groups that are working to make communities more sustainable and resilient through self-organisation and learning. The local network here was formed in 2009 by 9 people, and have created a range of projects…

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Jönköping – hot showers, chocolate cake, and other bike tourers

The road into Jönköping was one giant downhill, and at  the bottom we arrived at the kulturhuset (http://kulturhusetjonkoping.se/). We were warmly welcomed with hot coffee (and hot showers!) and shown to our sleeping place for the next three nights, a studio room with wall mirrors. And the whole building was quite huge! When we were shown the sleeping room, there were two other bike tourers already in there! It turned out they were touring together long distance and were passing through Jönköping on their way to Uddebo, where we had just come from. Interestingly, they had reclining style bikes, which…

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Uddebo Village – alternative living in the countryside

The first stop after Göteborg was the small village of Uddebo (http://uddebo.se/), home to around 300 people. A few years ago this small village was given new life when people from the city seeking alternative ways of living moved there, buying previously empty houses, fixing them up, and giving them new life. Since then, the village has grouped together more to start work on restoring a village building called the yellow house. Currently used as a freeshop and cafe, once restored the building will have many more potential uses.   The community has also built a sauna next to the…

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