Fantastic week in Älvdalen (Tinsku)
Dragonbane Diary 
March 5th – 10th, 2006
Turku, Finland –Älvdalen, Sweden –Turku, Finland
It was a nice Sunday morning when our group – Tiinaliisa (Tinsku), Elge, Mikko K, Mikko H and Pasi – started our journey to Älvdalen from Turku harbour. This was my first trip to Älvdalen and I was really exited but nervous. Because of several unfortunate and unexpected incidents, we were still missing one person, Mikko H., when the boat left from Turku. Beginning like this didn’t make me feel any better, so I decided to fix it by eating well at the boat buffee.
In the evening we left Elge in Stockholm and drove to Älvdalen. It was snowing really hard, but after over 5 hours driving, at 2 am, we finally arrived at the Älvdalen camping area and luckily found the key to our cottage. It was -25 degrees Celsius outside, but fortunately the cottage was heated.
On Monday morning we went to the garage of the forest owner Besparingskogen to get our most important equipment of the week: a snowmobile. The guys were supposed to move tree trunks to the other side of a swamp in Cinderhill and for that they needed a vehicle. We got a lovely orange snowmobile from the 80’s – it hadn’t been used for years. Mikko and Pasi thought that it would be a great baby-dragon if you just put wings in it. We hoped that it would also work as a snowmobile.
We had a meeting with the municipality’s environment department. They were really excited about our project and helpful. And so were all the other officers Mikko H. (after his late-arrival on Tuesday morning) and I met. Our local helper Tomas came for a visit on Monday evening and we had a good discussion over a nice cup of tea.
On Tuesday morning Mikko K and Pasi took the “Baby-Dragon” and went to Cinderhill. They found out that the village had survived from winter and snow. Unfortunately the Baby-Dragon was too old and weak to help with the actual work in one meter deep snow. So we started to work with plan B and track for local horse owners. Fortunately the next day the snowmobile tracks were that much frozen that guys got their home-made sledge to work and managed to move all the tree trunks.
On Thursday we drove to Mora and met people in one of our partner schools, St Mikael’s School. They are building modules for our small houses. They had also taken our project as a part of their English studies: students are translating our building instructions from English to Swedish.
This trip was really a learning experience to all of us. Pasi learned how to make pancakes and to play yatzy. Mikko K learned how to drive with a trailer. Mikko H learned that it’s not wise to miss a boat and I myself learned (after one week of training) how to open a Swedish door. We also learned that there is a thai restaurant in Älvdalen! It works in a caravan, but unfortunately it’s open only in weekends so we couldn’t test the food. We saw their menu in one place and it looked just fine. All the portions cost 55 Swedish crowns, not bad.
But the greatest experience of the week we got while shopping food in the local market. A Swedish bakery Pågen had invented a new type of bread: “osötad limpa” – bread without syrup. They had finally found the natural taste of bread and they give this product a money-back-taste-guarantee. We highly recommend “osötad limpa” to all of you. Welcome to the civilization in Sweden!
Tiinaliisa Turunen
PS. On our way back to Finland we all made it to the boat on time, because I forced us to be at the terminal two hours before the boat departure. And for your information (especially to Antti): NO cars were broken during this trip!
