w00t !

Hardly had I finalized the installation of the WordPress CMS through FTP to the Toile-libre web hosting service, that my colleague Corentin had already made an extensive advertisement campaign and published a quite generous article…

Now that I’m satisfied by the overall aspect of the website and that the plugins are correctly set up, I’ll be able to devote some of my time to writing articles, the topic of present one being our road trip from France to Scandinavia !

From the realm of cheese to the land of the Vikings

Storm before the calm

Our last semester in Caen at ENSICAEN / UCBN ended in quite a messy way, if we consider that within a couple of weeks we had to : take the exams at ENSICAEN, take the exams at UCBN (computer science research Master’s degree), empty, clean and check out our apartments, fill the several forms to go abroad and prepare the road trip…

These reasons, among others, led to the birth of a completely new and innovative music genre : the “I’m inflatin’ my bed while kickin’ a seriously groovy funk bass beat” !!!

Day 0

As Corentin lives in Lans-en-Vercors, a city in the French Alps close to Grenoble, I traveled by train from my hometown, Angoulême to reach the mountainous land of my road trip buddy.

Day 0 : Angoulême > Massy TGV > Lyon > Grenoble > Lans-en-Vercors

Day 1

After filling Corentin’s brand new Peugeot 306 break -bought at least two weeks before leaving- with plenty of guitars basses pianos computer gear useful luggage, we left his home, beating the very first kilometers of a ~3000 km trip !

– Corentin, one week before leaving : “Er, there’s just a tape player in the car, don’t you have one of those things, you know, to plug a mp3 player into ?”

– Aurélien : “Wait a minute ! Let’s take some good flavour from my vintage tape collection !”

That’s how we finally brought around 30 old Jazz/Blues/?/Rock tapes to accompaign our trip, each one being more WTF than the others… unless !?

(Watch the next episode to know what happened to our soundscape !)

Day 1 : Grenoble > Kassel

There’s nothing very interesting to say about the trip itself, given we mostly drove on highways, making some pauses to rest or eat something ! We’d like to decern a special mention to Germany, where ervery highway seems to cross strange-smelling industrial areas…

We initially planned to spend the first night in Darmstadt’s youth hostel, but there were no rooms left, due to a seminar taking place at the same period. In consequence, we decided to try again in Kassel, which proved to be such a good idea !

We lost a huge amount of time in Kassel’s surroundings, driving from industrial to residential areas, and vice-versa, before finding our way to the city center, where people led us to the nearest youth hostel, which was still open despite the late hours (’round 23 o’clock ^_^).

Day 2

After having a huge breakfast in Kassel, we went back to our traveling activities, aiming at crossing Denmark and reaching Sweden !

Day 2 : Kassel > Göteborg

To go from Germany to Denmark, one can take the Ferry at Puttgarden, which costs the cheap amount of 80€ for a four-wheeled car-type vehicle, for a 45-minutes cruise. For the occasion, we ate some cookies (yum yum !) made by Coline, Corentin’s sister .

When traveling through Denmark, our tape player suddently died in a silence, and none of our attemps to change the fuses and check the wires turned into a success… may God pray for its soulicon ! We currently think that one possible cause of its trespassing is an overdose of good ol’ Jazz Fusion !

One funny thing we encountered on the road were signs to the town of Greve (see pics below), which in French means “a strike” .

We finally left Denmark when taking the Malmö bridge, here again for the cheap amount of 43€. Then, we headed to Göteborg, where we had planned to find a youth hostel.

This one revealed to be quite tricky to find, as none of the pedestrians we asked our way to gave us the same information : hopefully, almost every person we spoke to made his/her best to help us, and we finally reached a hostel !

Day 3

Being tired of highways’ monotonous landscapes, we decided not to spend too much time on the road, and procrastinated (is this a real verb ? if not, please consider it as if it was.) the visit we were supposed to do in Oslo, where two friends of ours are for a 5-month internship.

Day 3 : Göteborg > Gjøvik

We arrived in Gjøvik just in time to grasp some minutes of the Tourist’s Office young receptionist (we almost arrived at the closing time, which is at 4 PM) to get a map of the city that we used to go to the University, where an International Buddy was waiting for us with the key to my apartment at Sørbyen Studenthjem, a residential unit where most international students live…

Photos shot during the trip

– Aurélien : “Is co-pilot a good situation ?”

While being on the highway, there’s almost nothing to do if you’re not the one driving the car… so you’ve got plenty of time to take photos, the highest challenge actually laying in finding something enough interesting to be worth a shot !