It would be an exaggeration to say I went to Sweden to ride a roller coaster, but it wouldn’t be THAT much of an exaggeration. I mean, I wanted to see what the Swedes had been up to and high-five a moose or whatever, sure, but I really wanted to ride Wildfire.

After The Netherlands and Italy taught me that I love European theme parks, I started to map out the rest of the parks I wanted to visit as I traveled around. I found an American YouTuber who had recently done a similar trip across Europe where he visited 22 parks, which helped me figure out which ones were worth going to. This was helpful since I’d never heard of a single one of them before. After all of this, his favorite roller coaster in all of Europe was Wildfire.

Wildfire was located in Sweden, outside of Stockholm at… wait it’s at a zoo? What the fuck? OK, it’s at a zoo. Huh. A zoo called Kolmården.

I flew into Stockholm, barely noticing before I boarded my flight in Cologne, Germany, that I was flying into NYO airport in Sweden. Isn’t the airport code for Stockholm STO? Oh, I’m coming into Stockholm Skavsta Airport. Huh. Well, it’s still called Stockholm, it must just be in a different part of the city from the main airport. It’ll be fine.

The dude at Swedish Immigration seemed confused about why I was there. I told him tourism, and he looked at me like he’d never encountered this concept before.

“Are you visiting friends?” he offered, hopefully.

“No, I’m here to see the sights.”

“What sights?”

Shit, does Sweden not have any sights? I should have checked.

“Like, museums and shit?”

He frowned and stamped me in.

Now I’ll just catch a train to the Best Western in central Stockholm- Oh… there’s no train from this airport? Uh, okay. Guess I’ll take the bus. Should be a quick- An hour and a half? Where the hell am I? I’m 100 kilometers from Stockholm?? Goddammit Sweden, I knew you were really liberal but I didn’t know that applied to naming your airports after a place just because it’s in the same country. Barely.

Nobody on the bus was wearing a mask. That’s weird. I called into a work meeting from a bus rolling across Sweden in the middle of the night, which was another one for my list of weird meeting call-ins.

At the hotel I took out my laptop to map out my trip to Kolmården in the morning. Probably going to be twenty or thirty min- FOUR HOURS? Where in the hell is this zoo?? I read that it was close to Stockholm-

It was back by the airport I had just come from.

Motherfff- Sweden, we need to have a serious conversation about what “near Stockholm” means to you.

Traveling by the seat of your pants and figuring it out as you go along is a lot of fun, but occasionally you do shoot yourself in the dick like this.

The airport bus didn’t run early enough for me to take it to Kolmården, and the zoo wasn’t exactly walking distance from there anyway. So it was an early-morning four hour train ride for me, so I could be at Kolmården when they opened.

At least the signs and shops at the train station made me laugh.

The train ride cost $60. Damn, Sweden. The train was very pleasant though, like a big rolling Ikea. After the train dropped me off, I ducked into a corner market for some cold vegan pulled chicken while I waited for the bus to take me the last two miles to Kolmården. I chatted with some German backpackers who were waiting for the same bus, who were greatly relieved to discover that they were at the right place. I mean, I hope this is it, what do I know?

It was! I walked through the gates of Kolmården right on time, and all was right in the world.

I skipped the zoo exhibits and made a bee-line through the woods to the back corner of the zoo, where Wildfire was said to be lurking. On the way I passed a closed-down kids’ area with a ride that featured an elephant wearing a sombrero, harkening back of course to the elephant’s natural habitat of Mexico.

After quite a hike I finally made it to Wildfire! Woohoo!

Wow, it’s beautiful! Look at that first drop, holy shit!

Wildfire was built into the mountainside itself, using the natural terrain in a way I’d never seen a coaster do before. It was the fastest wooden coaster in Europe, getting up to 71 miles an hour, and the second-tallest in the world. It was designed and built by Rocky Mountain Construction, an Idaho-based company that had rewritten all the rules in wooden coaster design in the past decade and shot to the top of the list of enthusiasts’ favorite manufacturers. It was not uncommon for roller coaster fans to travel the world just so they could ride all of RMC’s coasters. This would be my first.

Except… why isn’t the train zipping around the tracks? Am I too early? There was a rope across the entrance to the ride. Hmmm.

I walked around the ride to take in the layout. Half-way through I noticed something that made my heart sink. There was a train just sitting there in the middle of one of the dips in the track. Uh-oh.

The ride is broken.

Goddammit, Sweden.

Well, they’ll probably get it fixed within a few hours. Hopefully? I guess I’ll check out the zoo while they work on it.

The animals were wonderful and did their best to cheer me up.

Seals frolicked in a nearby aquarium.

Ooh they have some capybaras! Those huge South African rodents are so neat.

And tapirs! These guys have been some of my favorites ever since I got to hand-feed one some carrots in Belize. What gentle sweet animals.

I cracked up at the information signs describing each animal in the zoo. They weren’t intentionally funny, but the translations into Swedish made for some fun times.

Struts? Why in the world don't we call them Struts??

I hung out with the elephants for a while, who were good sports.

The ostriches were also entertaining. Their habitat had an underpass that went under the walkway for people, which made for some unusual ostrich angles.

I checked back on Wildfire in the afternoon. One other guy was sadly waiting for them to fix the ride. They had a fire truck backed up to the coaster, and workers were climbing the track and threading a thick steel cable that was attached to the truck’s winch through the supports for the track. Ohhh, they need to tow that stuck train back to the station. This might take a while. With the exception of some newer launched coasters, most roller coasters work entirely on gravity, so once they’re towed to the top of the lift hill and let go, they make their way through the entire course on gravity and momentum. If a train gets stuck somewhere, it’s not like there’s an engine you can flip on to drive it back to the station.

I found some vegan ice cream and let the chimpanzees console me.

The bathrooms at Kolmården were fascinating, because they were completely ungendered. All of them were unisex. Each stall had its own sink and hand-dryer, so there wasn’t any communal shared space inside the restroom at all. It was an interesting concept to see after we’d spent a year fighting over bathrooms in the US.

The meerkats weren’t sure what they thought about that.

The tiger exhibit had a Jeep driving half-way through the glass, which was more interesting than the hiding tigers. Maybe the Jeep was a distraction.

The centerpiece of the zoo was a cable car ride that carried you high above the zoo. This was pretty cool.

This wasn’t just a novelty, as it was actually the only way to see many of the big animals at the zoo, as they were kept in spacious and fairly natural habitats rather than pens. You soared over their heads, seeming not to disturb them too much as they went about their business.

The cable car rose up and down, coming closer to the animals that I assume can’t jump very well.

At the highest point, you got a beautiful view of the forest and the gorgeous lake beyond.

My favorite part was the section with the giraffes, both because it was cool to see giraffes from above, but also because it was feeding time, and a guy was coming through with the front-loader full of grass to feed the animals. The giraffes had already been fed, but they still took off after the front-loader when it went by. The guy driving it lowered the scoop down close to the ground as he rolled by, frustrating the pursuing giraffes who were not built to bend down that low. He rose the scoop back up over the heads of shorter animals who wanted to poach some grass as well. The whole thing was extremely entertaining.

After this ride ended I happened to walk past the gibbons right as they were being fed. A zookeeper tossed carrots across a small creek, and the gibbons took off running across the footbridge, up on their hind legs like people, racing to be the first to the carrots. Which was hilarious.

The zoo’s closing soon. I walked back to Wildfire. The guys had managed to tow the train half-way back to the station while I was gone, which was very impressive, but it was obvious the ride wasn’t going to start running in the next fifteen minutes before the zoo closed. Aw, nuts. At least I had a fun day with the animals.

On my way out I saw some people standing on a raised platform over a section of woods. I joined them to see what they were looking at.

Ah, it’s a wolverine habitat. But apparently the wolverine hadn’t been seen all day, he was off hiding in his den or something, out of sight. Eventually the families waiting on the platform with me gave up and went home. I stood and waited silently for a long while, while the zoo gradually emptied out and grew more and more quiet. As if on cue, the wolverine appeared on the horizon.

After some careful sniffing around, he came down to the fence in front of me and dug himself a little hole, then sat in it and scratched himself contentedly. So cool!

OK, that was a cool day, Wildfire or no Wildfire. The train slid silently through the darkening countryside on my long ride back to the city.

On the ride to Stockholm I couldn’t help but think… what if I went back? It looked like they had the ride almost fixed by the end of the day. I mean, it’s crazy to make another eight hour round trip and pay another $120 to get there and back… but it’s also the main thing I was excited about doing in this entire country. By the time I reached Stockholm I had decided I was going back.

Making the same trip the next morning felt almost like a familiar work commute now. I found a giant oat smoothie in the train station for breakfast and had figured out a better train route that only took 3 hours each way and was $50 for the round trip.

Breezing through the turnstiles of Kolmården, I stopped for a second to say hello to the tapirs who were getting their breakfast.

I made it to Wildfire and… there’s a train moving up the lift hill! Happy day!

I was in line in a blink. As I waited, the train went over the precipice and screams echoed out across the Scandivanian sky.

Inside, the station was themed after a sawmill, the ride operators working from inside the Foreman’s Office.

The train pulled back into the station, full of (socially distanced) satisfied customers. Wow, there are a lot of kids on this ride! Oh, right, we are at a zoo.

Soon I was in, and we were off!

The ride dragged us up the lift hill, climbing steeply higher and higher into the sky. Once we crested the 187 foot top of the hill, we were in for a surprise. Normally the top of the lift hill means you’re an instant away from plummeting straight down into roller coaster mayhem, but instead, we embarked on a circular path at the top of the hill, which gave us an incredible panoramic view of all of Sweden in every direction. Wow! Way to take advantage of the location! We seemed to accelerate unexpectedly and disconcertingly as we rounded the seemingly-flat turn.

This is incredi- AAAAAAAAAAAAH!

The ride suddenly dropped off the cliff and we hit the ride’s 71 mph top speed in a giant hurry during the gut punch of the first drop.

We swooped to the bottom of the drop and raced back up another hill, when holy crap! We just went upside down! I’d never gone upside-down on a wooden roller coaster before. I didn’t think they could do that.

Wooden roller coasters are some of my favorites for the way they rumble and flex unpredictably during the ride, the wooden supports actually bending and moving as the train rolls over them, which adds a chaotic element of instability that adds to the excitement. The price you pay for this is that they generally don’t go as fast as steel roller coasters and they don’t go upside down. Until now. RMC is apparently making them go upside down. Holy cow.

Only we didn’t just go upside down. As the track twisted and bent, forcing us into the roll, the train suddenly slowed and we hung weightless upside down for a long second before completing the roll and racing down the next drop. Wow! So that’s what they call an Inverted Zero-G Stall. Fun.

Immediately we were racing along the mountainside and following the dips and contours of the rock. And we were flying. So much for wooden roller coasters not going that fast!

We banked into turns where the track was completely perpendicular to the ground. Wow, I’ve never seen that on a wooden coaster either.

Then we hit the second inversion. This was something called a heartline roll, which is where the track is designed so that your head stays in exactly the same position as the train goes through the barrel roll, so instead of feeling like you’re going upside down, it feels like you’re standing still and the entire world is spinning around you. That was crazy! This was my favorite part of the ride.

We dropped down further and the train went through sixteen airtime hills, floating us out of our seats at the top of each one, and then a heartline roll in the opposite direction, before slaloming us back into the station. Whoosh.

OK. That was fantastic. It had all the fancy tricks of new roller coasters with the visceral rumble and roar of the old wooden ones. I’m so glad I came back. And these Swedish children are the bravest kids I’ve ever seen.

I proceeded to loop Wildfire as many times as the day would allow.

One of the aims of a roller coaster enthusiast, as I was quickly learning, was to experience “airtime” or having your butt come out of the seat on the drops and when the coaster goes upside-down. This sense of weightlessness is one of the key thrills of any ride, but it is often negated completely by rides that buckle you in too tightly for you to get any separation from your seat. This dreaded experience is called getting “stapled” and everyone has their own strategy for avoiding it. Any ride suitably radical will have ride personnel going person to person before the ride starts, checking everyone’s restraints, and pushing down on them to make sure you’re locked in snug as a bug in a rug. Which is not really what you want. So folks in the know will do things like scoot their hips forward in the seat and ball up their fists between their chest and the shoulder restraints when the ride attendant comes by, so that after they’ve smooshed down on the restraints you can scoot back, dislodge your fists and enjoy a few crucial inches to enjoy the weightlessness.

I was getting a feel for this as I looped Wildfire. I’d already realized the back row was where you wanted to sit, since you got whipped over the top of the drops faster in the back, and got the most intense experience of that big first drop. With each loop of the ride I experimented with creating more and more space inside the restraints. Wow! I’m really coming out of my seat on that big drop now!

On my fifth or sixth ride we hit the big drop and I came waaaaaaay out of my seat, like I was basically standing up in the back row. WOW this is great but maybe I’ve pushed it too far? Suddenly we hit the bottom of the drop and my restraints went CLACKCLACKCLACKCLACK loudly as they slammed down with the force of gravity and locked in several notches tighter than where they’d started the ride. Ha ha, okay! That was probably too loose.

As I was looping the ride I noticed there was an 11 year old local boy who was doing the same, and he was wearing a Wildfire t-shirt. That’s cool. I laughed to myself that this is my peer group now. Then I had the same exact experience on Taiga in Finland. Wait, that’s not the same kid, is it? It can’t be. I mean, it seems unlikely. How would that kind be traveling internationally? OK maybe it’s the same kid. These kids are way too young to be on this ride anyway, I don’t understand how Scandinavia works.

By the time the zoo’s short day ended, I had ridden Wildfire ten times and I was on cloud nine. Thanks Sweden.

All right Stockholm, what else you got for me?

Uhm… well. Okay. I don’t really feel like I know that farmer well enough for this. You have anything else?

Like all European cities, Stockholm has its statue of a white dude on a horse. These are all made on the same assembly line in Prague, and you can choose from a menu of options for what the horse dude is holding: a sword, an axe, a gordita, or a native infant ripped from his mother's womb and dashed on the rocks of manifest destiny.

Yeah, I saw your horse dude statue already, Stop it, Stockholm.

OK that’s enough statues, Stockholm. Seriously. What else you got? Some flowers?

Ah well that’s nice. Any fountains with barfing geese?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say… Deer Art for $400?

Let’s try… random palaces and flags and things.

Cool. Streets?

Nicely done. How about you scatter a bunch of lions everywhere for no reason?

OK. Church me.

Do you have a moment so we can talk about Odin’s plan for you?

Stockholm was full of lovely window displays.

And... wait. Is that an elevator full of snakes? Tell me you guys can see that too.

OK, OK, OK, I’m seeing things. Let’s move o- OH GODDAMMIT.

That’s it I’m taking the stairs.

All right on second thought I’m not taking any stairs that are advertised for use in a fire with the words “Avoid Trappin’”. I also like that one of the “In Case of Emergency” dudes in the smoke-filled stairwell is going UP the stairs. Guys, don’t follow Phil. He’s not going to live to see 30.

Stockholm, you are full of lovely but utterly empty outdoor cafes and some of the most modest boasting I’ve ever seen in my life.

Sweden, Sweden, Sweden. How is Superman supposed to change clothes in this?

Two things struck me as strange as I was walking around in Stockholm. One was that I was literally the only person in all of Sweden wearing a mask. No exaggeration. It’s no secret that Sweden went their own way with covid-19 precautions, but it was still very jarring to be there and see it in person. I’d been to countries where masks were more prevalent and countries where they were less, but in Sweden there were none whatsoever. It was like I was somehow visiting 2019. Heed my warning, people! The end times are coming!

Children were looking at me quizzically, like “Mommy, what is that strange man wearing?” I even felt sort of rude, somehow. It was very strange.

The other thing that struck me as strange is that Swedish people greet each other by saying “Hey Hey.” This sounds stranger in reality than I think it looks in writing. I was introduced to this as I was walking through the zoo. I heard a deep voice say HEY HEY. I looked around, looking for Barry White or the cartoon character that had snuck up on me. The only person near me was a tiny six year old girl walking with her mother. She looked at me quizzically. They had moved on before I realized it had been the little girl, and she was saying hello to me. Which I rudely did not respond to at all because I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

Sweden was not very good at vegan food, but you can get vegan hot dogs almost anywhere. Inside the subway, whatever, doesn’t matter.

They’re not very good.

Several things surprised me about Stockholm, compared to what I had imagined before I arrived. For one, it’s not as big as I had expected. The city only has a million people, with 2.4 million in the overall metro area. All of Sweden only has 10 million people. Much like with Finland, I had imagined these countries as having a lot more people in them.

The city also has much more of a maritime feeling than I expected, which is because it’s actually a bunch of islands. I had no idea. But when I decided it was time to explore a different part of the city, I discovered that this involved taking a ferry to one of the other islands, called Djurgården.

On my long walk to the docks I passed some bizarre roadside sculpture garden.

On the way across the water we passed Gröna Lund, Stockholm’s amusement park, which was sadly closed due to covid, along with Sweden’s other big park Liseberg, both of which had been on my list to visit. It was really more of a lucky quirk that Kolmården had been open, due to some kind of zoo exemption or something. Gröna Lund and Liseberg are actually still closed as I write this in 2021.

On my new island home I was staying the night at the ABBA Museum, just because I could.

ABBA are Swedish of course, and my room had a knob you could turn to pipe in ABBA music if you ever got lonely.

I’m 99% certain I was the only person staying there, as I got the same surprised “Oh... you?” reaction I received everywhere I checked in on this trip.

Djurgården had its own-

Dammit Sweden, what did I tell you about the horse dude statues??

But the real draw over on this side of town was the Vasa Museum.

The Vasa was a Swedish warship built in 1626 on orders from the King of Sweden, to support his naval badassery against Poland. Wait, Poland had a navy? Apparently so.

King Gustavus Adolphus had led Sweden on its rise from obscurity, as the poor and lightly populated country quickly rose to the dominant power in the region. This was accomplished by focusing virtually all of the country’s resources on warfare, making it one of the most militarized states in history. The Vasa was commissioned as the navy’s flagship and a display of Adolphus and Sweden’s power.

The grand warship was finished in 1628 and set out on its maiden voyage from Stockholm harbor with great fanfare. Then after three-quarters of a mile, still within sight of the celebration, it tipped over and sank straight to the bottom of the sea. Waah waah wwaaaaaah.

Well, that was awkward.

It turned out the ship had been built way too tall and narrow, with too many guns placed high up in the hull, so when it hit the slightest breeze outside the harbor, it tipped and the water flooded into all the gun ports on the sides of the ship. And it was straight to the bottom from there.

The king had put intense pressure on the shipbuilders to finish in time for his planned naval campaigns, and everyone who had concerns about the design was too afraid to mention them and derail the building process. Classic example of dysfunctional management. Apparently that’s not a new concept.

The Vasa Museum is an amazing museum for an amazingly bad ship. A theater tells you the story of the Vasa being rediscovered at the bottom of a busy shipping channel in Stockholm Harbor in the late 1950s. After a hilarious-sounding plan that involved filling the hull of the sunken ship with ping pong balls was tragically abandoned, the ship was raised to the surface in 1961 by lifting it on steel cables attached to floating pontoons. The ship spent over 20 years in a temporary shipyard before the Vasa Museum was built. During the early decades of restoration, the ship had to be continually sprayed with water, since allowing it to dry would have caused the wood to crack, destroying the ship. Being buried in the mud at the bottom of the harbor had protected the ship surprisingly well. Eventually it was determined that the best method to preserve the ship was to spray it with polyethylene glycol, a petroleum polymer that would impregnate the wood and allow it to dry without suffering damage. The spraying went on for 17 years and the hull is still drying today.

The restoration process uncovered some funny tidbits. As for why the ship sunk, one of the reasons is that different teams working on the ship were using different measurements, one was using the 12-inch Swedish foot while another used the 11-inch Amsterdam foot, which resulted in the ship being lopsided. It was also discovered that the main reason the ship had remained preserved for several hundred years is that the water in Stockholm harbor was so polluted, even back in the 1600s, that none of the organisms that feed on decaying wood could survive in the water there.

The ship had originally been heavily decorated and brightly-colored, and the museum demonstrates this by presenting some of the sculptures from the hull repainted using the same types of pigments and colors that would have been in use back in the 1600s.

And who could forget this poor guy, who was really wishing he'd splurged for a bigger cabin.

The museum also chillingly has the skeletons from the 17 bodies found in the wreckage, and has done some eerie recreations of what some of the sailors would have looked like, based on their bones and the clothing items found around their bodies.

There’s also an exhibit on the women found in the wreckage. The launching of the ship was a ceremonial affair, so there were several women on board who would have disembarked before the ship truly went out to sea.

Another room recreated one of the gun decks, so you could stoop under the low roof and see what it was like to be in there when the canons were jumping all over the place, or in this case when cold sea water was pouring in those holes and everybody was bailing like crazy.

Cool stuff, Sweden, I like that you have a beautiful museum of failure and that it’s your most popular tourist attraction. The next time I’m entering the country and your Immigration officers are asking me what I’m there for, I’ll tell them I’m there to see the shitty boat. They’ll understand.