Global Route

About

Hello. I'm Mikael — a Stockholm-based engineer who keeps a small travel journal on the side. This is that journal.

I have lived in Stockholm since 2016. Before that I lived for a while in Gothenburg, and before that I grew up in a town near Sundsvall that you have probably not heard of. I work on backend systems during the week. On weekends, when the weather and the timetable cooperate, I try to be on a train.

This site started, more or less, in early 2022. I had been keeping a paper notebook for years and wanted to put a few of the longer pieces somewhere that was not a social network. I'm not against social networks; I just stop writing carefully when I post on them. A small, slow website is the opposite of that. It also lets me put pictures next to the words without the pictures being squashed.

How it is made

This site is hand-written HTML and CSS. There is no framework, no analytics, no comment section, no cookies. The fonts are whatever fonts your operating system happens to ship with — which means it looks slightly different on every device, and I have made peace with that.

The pictures start as quick reference frames from a small mirrorless camera that I have had since 2019, and occasionally from a phone when the camera was at home. Some stay as photographs, some become simple route sketches when the original frame is too private or too messy to publish. I do not retouch much — exposure, sometimes a crop, that's about it.

Small notes

I keep a loose paper log for train numbers, weather, odd café names, and the small practical things that disappear from memory first. A few of those details make it here; most stay in the notebook.

Mikael Lindgren

What you won't find here

If you want to write

There is a contact page. I read everything. I sometimes reply the same week; I sometimes take a month. I am especially happy to hear from people who have been to one of the places I wrote about and want to disagree with me about it.

Thanks for stopping by.

— Mikael