Ring your bell when you smell Adventure!

Me riding my bike onto the ferry! If your a biker you get to enter and exit the ferry FIRST, ahead of all the cars and people. Very exciting :) P.S. Yes, Mom, I'm wearing a HELMET!!!!!

 So... A few weekends ago I went to Helsingborg, Sweden with some friends from my kollegium. It's really easy to get to Sweden from Denmark (you can see Sweden from Denmark from many places along the coast anyway), all you have to do is take a train to Helsingor, Denmark and then take a ferry to Sweden! We planned a bike trip to a nature reserve in Sweden, and we were originally planning to bike to the nature reserve, walk around the nature reserve for a few hours and eat our lunch, then bike back. This was going to total to about 50 miles of biking in one day... but fortunately for our gluteous maximuses a few things went askew along the way so we never actually made it to the nature reserve... but we still had a great time!

Hiking along the coast of Sweden

So what ACTUALLY happened when we got to Sweden was that we had no idea how to get to the nature reserve. We spent a while asking various people for directions and eventually figured out that all we had to do was basically bike up the coast. This went fairly well at first (once we got over a huge hill) but when we stopped in a random field to eat our lunch and sing campfire songs, Meghan realized that her bike tire was flat! So we asked a random woman walking if there was anywhere nearby that had a bike pump. She said, "My house" and took Meghan to her house to get it fixed! Unfortunately it turned out that there was actually a huge hole in the tire that couldn't be fixed... but luckily the nice elderly couple next door offered to drive Meghan and her bike back to the town and the Hostel we were staying at. Don't do this in America, folks, people there aren't always this trustworthy!

Liz, Steph, and myself enjoying the wind in the forest

So the remainder of our group decided to explore the nature a little before meeting Meghan back at the hostel. We ended up turning our bike trip into a biking and hiking trip, and explored the Swedish coast a bit!

Creepin' on the house of some rich Swedish person

No explanation needed...

While on our hike, we accidentally stumbled upon the back of a park called Sofiero, which is where the Swedish Royal family used to spend their summers. It was incredibly beautiful and there were several interesting statues. Here is the link to the Sofiero website: http://www.sofiero.se/

Feeding the rat statue... a small rock. Nom nom.

They're so cute!

Making our own addition to the Sofiero statues. From left: Liz, myself, and Isabelle.

Meghan, Liz and I looking at Helsingborg from the top of the tower!

Steph, Liz and I looking at the city from the tower tippy top.  

 Some things that happened worth mentioning that I don't have pictures for:

• Steph and I played a nail biting game of pool at the Hostel on Saturday night. We were pretty evenly matched, which was good but also hilarious. Each of us managed to accidentally make some really spectacular shots as well as some really spectacularly awful ones, one of which had us laughing for about 5 minutes straight. Well it started out as us laughing at my shot, and then we just started laughing at each other laughing...
• I had an interesting encounter with a man lifting weights in the "exercise" room that was right next to our room. I went in to ask him to turn down his music, but we had a bit of a language barrier problem. Somehow he understood "I am from California," but could not understand "Could you please turn down your music," even when I did my expert miming. Oh well. 
• At one point along our journey back into town on Sunday we passed a pirate themed playground. We had to climb on it, even though we got some weird looks from parents and children alike...

Okay well that's all I have for now! Oh and by the way the title of this blog was inspired by our spontaneous, play-it-by ear type approach to our journey, once we realized things weren't going to go as planned. There were so many cool things to see and do along the coast that we decided we would ring our bells when we "smelled" adventure (my phrasing...), and then all of us would pull over together to explore. 

BAM.