Basically the story of me climbing up muddy hills in the pouring rain ~ in Sweden!// Day #4 of my backpacking adventure on the Kullaleden

Sadly, I don't have a picture going with the main part of this story. Because otherwise the rain would have destroyed my camera and the pictures wouldn't have survived anyways.

Well, my phone fell into the toilet and it still works, so maybe I'm wrong.. but that's a story for another time..

To get you started, here's a picture of where we would end up.

But it took a whole lot of work to get there..

Day #4

I'm kind of getting used to sleeping in intervals. Half hour sleep- half hour turning around trying to make the wooden ground magically turn into a king-sized feathered bed. But sleeping in a bed was not the point of this trip. So not really sleeping is just fine. Plus, choosing this wind shelter was soo much better than having to put up a tent last night.

I woke up at 8 a.m. with my head on the wrong side of the thin thing I call my sleeping mat. But is there really a wrong side if you don't have a pillow anyways? The "toilet" stunk horribly.

After breakfast we left for the last 9km of the so-called "moderate" part of our trail.

Soon it started raining. And it never stopped..

The pathway was exciting- uphill, downhill, up some steep, stony, muddy hills. And I'm not kidding when I say steep and muddy. I had to hold on to tree branches so that my heavy backpack wouldn't pull me back down the hills. We all slipped a few times, but surprisingly none of us three actually fell down (except for my water bottle)! Would've been hard to call for help from there as we were in a forest.. in the pouring rain.

To be honest, I felt super adventurous. Oh, and we ran into cows again! But the last 2km were horrible. I was wearing shorts, so my legs were full of mud, and all my clothes (including my raincoat) were dripping wet! It was cold. Not to mention that our feet hurt from all the walking.

Eventually, four hours later, we reached Arild and decided to look for a café to warm up and plan our next move. This is where what we ended up finding:

A 4-star hotel with a restaurant ~ Hotel Rusthållargården

Now obviously we didn't have the money to spend the night there or even have a meal.

And we felt bad for entering this fancy hotel with out muddy, wet shoes. But the staff was really nice, they let us put down our wet backpacks and shoes, and then we went to change our wet clothes in the restroom.

Ha- if only any of my clothes inside my backpack were dry. The backpack was NOT waterproof.

In the end I found a shirt that was only halfway wet and then tried to clean my legs, which didn't really work out. On socks, we headed into a beautiful room and ordered hot chocolates.

We decided to look for a hostel, just so we could let our clothes dry over night. After calling two different places we found something. We reserved the attic room of Bläsingegård and took two busses to Jonstorp. In the bus we ate TUC crackers and cinnamon rolls.

We had to walk another 2km through a muddy field to get there, but it was so worth it. The first picture of this post in what it looked like from the outside.

The door to our room

Our room. Keep in mind that it only looked this way for the first three seconds we were there. Then everything was full of wet clothes.

You can see my entire emptied backpack on the ground.

Our weird window..

And the view out the window

The hotel even had a kitchen that everyone could use, so we warmed up our ramen noodles and put them in a bowl. Which immediately made it seem like a normal, healthy meal!

Some people (they were Germans as well) offered us some of their homemade lasagna. Since I'm a vegetarian, I couldn't eat it though.