Over the Big Bridge to Scania--Southern Sweden

The sun poured into the room at an ungodly hour, so my wake-up call at 7:15 was redundant. It gets light at about 4:30 am here, a long day. We drove over the 16 km Oresund Bridge, a combination of tunnels and graceful sweeping spindles, and drove along the flat green fields of Scania, Southern Sweden. Our guide, Jessica Jonsson, told us that this was the country's breadbasket, here most of the lovely white potatoes, rapeseed, and other crops are grown. Windmills slowly twirled in the distance as we drove in the van toward Ales Stenar, all the way on the eastern coast.

Here we saw the stones. We parked next to the rich fishing harbor of Loderup. Up a hill, at the end of a windy path, the Ales Stenar, or Ales stones waited for us. These are 59 boulders standing on end, a sort-of poor man's Stonehenge, with all of the same mystery and ancient intrigue. The position of the stones on either end lined up with the locations of the sun on the longest and shortest days of the year, the all important solstice. It's a stone ship and with us were a crowd of teenagers smoking, joshing and kicking a soccer ball outside next to the stones.

We learned that people in Sweden are taxed far less than their brothers across the bridge in Denmark. And they get paid more due to the higher currency value in Sweden. So many many Danes live over in Sweden, and commute using the railway over this bridge to their jobs in Copenhagen. It's becoming one region, there was not much of a customs check, we just drove through. By the side of the road, I saw two deer standing in an open wheat field.