cold flat granite, birch poles, and no darkness after midnight
Reserve a Hoga Kusten midsummer trip in Sweden, eight nights
Eight nights on Hoga Kusten, on the Gulf of Bothnia, six of them in a timber cabin above the fishing village of Bonhamn and two in a room on the island of Ulvon, from $3,633 a person on two sharing. It runs once, out of Harnosand on 22 June 2027 and back there on the 30th, across the week the sun stops going properly down. The shoreline underneath it is rising out of the sea at about a third of an inch a year, and from the cabin window you can see where the water used to be.
Eight nights, from $3,633 per person.
Reserve a Hoga Kusten midsummer trip in Sweden and what you are holding is eight nights on the sixty miles of Baltic shoreline between Harnosand and Ornskoldsvik, in the week the sun stops going properly down. Six of those nights are in a timber cabin on the Nordingra peninsula, above the fishing village of Bonhamn. Two are in a room over the harbor street on Ulvon, an island an hour and a quarter offshore. The week runs once. It begins at the rail station in Harnosand at three in the afternoon on Tuesday 22 June 2027 and ends at the same station before eleven on the morning of Wednesday 30 June, and there is no second date behind it.
The thing this shoreline does that other shorelines do not is rise. The ice on top of it was around two miles thick, the ground has been springing back ever since it went, and the total so far is 938 feet. It is still coming, about a third of an inch every year, which is roughly thirty two inches in a century. You do not need instruments to see it. At Bonhamn there are boathouses whose sills were laid at the waterline and now stand a step above it, and the village has shifted its jetty twice within the memory of people still living there.
Practically, the week is a fixed base, a guide on six of the nine days, one water crossing, three long walks and four days with nothing written into them at all. It is not a walking holiday in the sense of covering ground. The longest day on foot is nine miles.
When it goes
One departure, 22 June 2027
one fixed date: it runs once this year, and there is not another
What is reserved
A Hoga Kusten midsummer trip in Sweden
Eight nights, from $3,633 per person. Send a booking request
Two beds held for eight nights, six in a two bedroom cabin on the Nordingra peninsula and two in a room over the harbor street on Ulvon, with a nine seat van moving you between them and one water crossing in the middle of the week.
The ground here is going up. The ice that sat on this shoreline was around two miles thick, the land has come back 938 feet since it left, and it is still rising about a third of an inch a year, which is why the boathouses at Bonhamn stand a full step above the water they were built to open onto and why fields of surf rounded stones sit 900 feet up the side of Skuleberget with no surf anywhere near them. The rock is a red granite with feldspar crystals you can pick out with a thumbnail, and at Rotsidan it runs into the sea in flat shelves for a mile and a quarter, so you walk on the shore rather than beside it. Skuleskogen, the park at the north end, covers 11 square miles and holds one crevice, Slattdalsskrevan, 650 feet long, 130 feet deep and 23 feet across at the floor, with vertical walls the whole way through. In the last week of June the sea off Norrfallsviken reads 55 to 59 degrees and the air gets to 63 or 68 in the afternoon before dropping to about 46 at four in the morning. The sun clears the water at ten minutes to three and goes back into it at ten past eleven, and in between there is no darkness of any kind, only a blue trough around one o'clock when a map is still readable without a lamp.
Eight nights of beds on two sharing, six in a two bedroom timber cabin with a kitchen and a wood stove and two in a room on Ulvon; ground transport from Harnosand and back in a nine seat van, with every mile of the week inside it; the crossing out to Ulvon and the crossing back, which the company that owns the boat runs under its own license and bills for itself; a Swedish speaking guide on six of the nine days, including all three long walks; breakfast every morning, bought in and left in the cabin kitchen for the first four days; four dinners, one of them the midsummer table on the Friday; the cable car up Skuleberget for anyone who would rather not walk the 964 feet; bed linen, towels and the end clean; paper maps at 1:50,000 of Skuleskogen and the Nordingra peninsula, one set per cabin.
The flight to Sweden from the middle of the United States, roughly $900 to $1,450 round trip in late June; the train or bus north from Stockholm to Harnosand, $55 to $110 each way; four dinners, $22 to $45 a head in a village kitchen and up to $60 on Ulvon; lunches every day, $12 to $22 a head, or nothing if you carry bread from the cabin; drinks, at $7 to $9 for a beer and $9 to $13 for a glass of wine; the ten minute boat out to the lighthouse island off Bonhamn, $18 to $26 return, weather permitting; sole occupancy of a cabin bedroom, $610 for the week; a rental car if you want one on the free days, $70 to $95 a day plus fuel at about $7.20 a gallon; laundry, at $9 a load in the village machine.
Do not book this if 1,150 feet of climb over boulder steps in a single day is beyond you, because the Skuleskogen crossing has no exit at the halfway point and no vehicle can reach the middle of it. Do not book it if mosquitoes end a trip for you; from the third week of June the bog ground behind the cabins produces them in quantity, they are at their worst between eight and eleven at night, and wind is no help once you are inland of the first ridge. The room on Ulvon is up twenty two steps with your bag, there are no cars on the island, and the last boat off in the afternoon goes at half past four whatever you have not finished. There is very little to do after nine at night in a village of forty people, in full daylight, when sleep will not come.
Land that comes up out of the water
Nordingra is red. The bedrock is a coarse granite full of feldspar, and at Rotsidan it does something unusual: instead of breaking into cliffs it lies down and runs into the sea in flat shelves for a mile and a quarter, scoured smooth, with shallow pools left in the dips. People walk it barefoot in June. The pools warm up to 70 degrees by four in the afternoon while the open water twenty feet away sits at 57.
Skuleskogen covers 11 square miles at the north end of the peninsula and contains one thing everybody comes for. Slattdalsskrevan is a straight crevice cut through the top of a hill, 650 feet long, 130 feet deep, 23 feet wide at the floor, with walls that go up on both sides without a ledge. There is snow at the bottom of it into the second week of June most years. Higher up on the same hill, and on Skuleberget across the valley at 964 feet, there are open fields of fist sized stones, rounded and sorted by wave action that stopped reaching them somewhere around four thousand years ago. They are old beaches, standing where no sea has been since before the pyramids.
Nine days along one shoreline
Nothing in the week is more than 55 miles from the cabin door, but the distances behave badly. The main road is fast and the last two miles into most of the villages are gravel and single track with passing places, so the 25 miles to Bonhamn takes about forty five minutes and nobody hurries it. Two of the three long walks start within twenty minutes of the cabins. The third, the crossing of Skuleskogen, is a one way walk with the van waiting at the far gate.
Meet at the Harnosand rail station at three; 35 miles north to the cabins; bread, eggs, butter and herring already in the kitchen
Rotsidan, a mile and a quarter of flat red rock, barefoot if the weather holds; back at the cabins by four
Skuleskogen, south gate to north gate by way of the crevice, 9 miles and 1,150 feet of climb, about seven hours with stops
Free until two, then the pole goes up in the meadow at Nordingra and the guide stays until it finishes, which is late
Everything is shut. A short walk to the fishing chapel at Barsta, and a swim off the stones for whoever is willing
Boat from Docksta at 09:20, an hour and a quarter to Ulvohamn; the rest of the day is the village and the strait
Ulvon on foot: the 1622 chapel with its painted ceiling, the smokehouse, and the path over the ridge to the north harbor, 4 miles
Back on the mainland by one; Skuleberget in the afternoon, on foot or on the cable car; last dinner at the cabins
35 miles south, at the Harnosand station before eleven
Midsummer falls on Friday 25 June
Swedish midsummer is not on a fixed date. It lands on the Friday between the 19th and the 25th of June, and in 2027 it lands on the 25th, the latest it can go, which is why this week sits where it does. That Friday, the grocery in the nearest village closes at one in the afternoon and does not open again until Monday morning. The buses run a Sunday timetable. If you have forgotten something, you have forgotten it until Monday.
What happens is straightforward and it happens outdoors. Birch branches and meadow flowers are cut in the morning and bound onto a wooden cross, the cross goes up in a field with maybe two hundred people around it, most of whom live within ten miles, and then there are ring dances in a fixed order that everybody but you already knows. The food is pickled herring, new potatoes lifted early, sour cream, chives, and strawberries that are barely ready this far north. It rains on it about every other year and nobody moves indoors. You are standing in a public meadow with a village, not sitting at a family's table, and this office will not pretend otherwise.
Holding the beds for 22 June
Send the form at the foot of this page, or call +1 (816) 525-2846 on a working day. Putting a firm figure against this departure, with the cabin split you want and any sole occupancy, takes two to four working days, because the answer depends on what the cabin owner and the house on Ulvon still have free that week and both of them get asked by name before anybody quotes you.
Nothing that carries or houses you here belongs to Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC. The cabins are owned by a family on the peninsula, the van and the driver are a local firm, the boat across to the island is somebody else's vessel on somebody else's license, and the room above the harbor street is a private house. The company that runs the week signs its contract with you and sends its bill to you directly. Third Coast Dispatch takes no money at any stage: no deposit, no card, no checkout on this site.
The flight over is not part of this and this office does not sell airfare. Getting yourself to Sweden and north to the start is your own arrangement; for reference, the train from Stockholm to Harnosand takes six and a half hours and there are four a day. The office is at 600 SW Jefferson St, Suite 302 in Lee's Summit, MO 64063, inside the Kansas City metro, and Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC is registered in Missouri. Written questions go to bookings@thirdcoastdispatch.com. If a distance, a time or a figure on this page is wrong, write to corrections@thirdcoastdispatch.com and it gets corrected.
Send this office a booking request
Open 24/7, this form will take a booking request whenever you write it. Nowhere on it is a card number requested and nothing is charged, because no money is ever owed to this office. Whatever reaches the form is opened in the order it landed, and an answer goes back inside one working day.
Nowhere on this page is a card number requested, and none is kept by this office anywhere. Writing costs you nothing and ties you to nothing. Asking is not the same as holding: your date belongs to whoever asks next until the operating company has confirmed it on paper and you have read what it requires of you.