Day 9: Rättvik to Karlstad

Click here to enlarge this panorama or see an ultra high-resolution version.

If you're Swedish, what might you do on a Saturday in August? Well, if you live in Dalarna you might take your horse out for a spin at a horse show. Just as with other shows, there is dressage (yawn), but unlike other shows, in Dalarna we also get to see horses competing at doing an honest day's work, of the kind that for centuries has let farmers clear forests and build houses.

(A note on Dalarna for the uninitiated: Swedes consider Dalarna to be a kind of ancestral homeland, the location where Swedish origin myths are played out — much like the Shire is to Hobbits in Lord of the Rings. And Dalarna is also where the "Dalahäst" comes from — that red Swedish horse that populates many a Swedish souvenir shop. One this blog, you only get the real thing, however.)

Just a few kilometers away is the famous (again, if you're Swedish) Dalhalla, a concert hall at the bottom of an old open-pit mine. I drove by there eager to check it out, as we have a version of it at our virtual embassy in Second Life, but there was somebody there who wanted a lot of money for a peek at a stage with no actors or musicians on it. I'm not cheap but I'm not stupid either, so I passed on that "opportunity".

Later on in the day, I stopped by Falun, which houses yet another World Heritage Site — the historic open-pit copper mine. I took a photo from the edge of the pit:

Alas there is no access to the bottom of the pit. It would have made an excellent vantage point for a panorama.

For the sake of full disclosure, the panorama above shows the same human-and-horse team twice, competing in a time trial at loading logs onto a sled, transporting them, and then unloading them. A couple of other people also show up twice — isn't computer technology wonderful?