On the WaterJun – Aug
Canal Passage
Cutting Sweden in half
The Göta Canal is an early nineteenth-century attempt to cut Sweden in half, and it worked — a chain of hand-dug canal, lake and river running from the Baltic to the North Sea, with more than fifty locks lifting boats over the country's spine and down the other side.
It took twenty-two years and something like fifty-eight thousand men, most of them soldiers, digging with hand tools. It was commercially obsolete almost immediately because the railway arrived, and it survived as a pleasure route instead.
You go at walking pace. That is not a figure of speech — cyclists on the towpath keep up with you, and people on the bank talk to you as you pass.