Global Route
Notes and photographs from trips that were mostly short, mostly northern, and rarely went entirely to plan.
My name is Mikael Lindgren. I live in Stockholm, in a flat with a kitchen table that doubles as a desk and a drying rack for camera bags. I work an ordinary job with ordinary holiday allowance, which means the travelling here is not the sort that involves quitting anything or finding oneself. It is four days in Skane, a week on Gotland, a long weekend somewhere with a ferry timetable I have misread at least once. I started keeping these notes in 2022 because I kept forgetting which harbour had the good bread, and it grew from there.
Everything on the site is mine: the writing, and every photograph. I shoot with one camera and one lens, partly out of principle and mostly because carrying two of anything makes me miserable by the second afternoon. The results are uneven. Some entries have a picture I am genuinely pleased with; others have a slightly grey pier and a caption apologising for it. I would rather keep the grey pier than pretend the light was better than it was.
I write irregularly. There is no schedule, no newsletter, nothing to subscribe to. Sometimes an entry appears a fortnight after I get home, sometimes six months later, when I finally sit down with the notebook and can still remember what the wind was doing. Winters are quiet here. Occasionally a whole trip goes unwritten because nothing happened worth reporting, which I think is a perfectly respectable outcome and one that travel writing generally refuses to admit.
What you will find, then: ferry times I got wrong, bus stops in the rain, harbour cafes that closed at four, one memorable argument about how to pronounce a place name, and a great many photographs of water. If that sounds tolerable, the journal is through here, and there is a slightly longer account of me on the about page.
Recent entries
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Gotland in July, against my better judgement
Everyone told me to avoid the island in high season. I went anyway, cycled more than intended, and found the good hours were early, before the ferries emptied.
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A spring week around the Sound
Six days of trains, borrowed bicycles and beech woods coming into leaf, with a persistent wind off the water and one very good bakery in Landskrona.
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Lofoten, late season
Arriving after the summer crowds and before the winter light, when half the cafes have shut and the weather changes its mind roughly every ninety minutes.
From the gallery
Elsewhere
Nowhere, really. I do not keep social accounts, and I have stopped explaining that as a principled stand — the honest reason is that posting a photograph within the hour ruins the photograph for me. I need a few weeks between taking a picture and deciding whether it was any good, and no feed is patient enough for that. So the site is the whole of it. If you want to say something, correct a place name, or tell me the bakery has changed hands, there is an address on the contact page and I read everything, if slowly.