M A G I C !!!
Malin brought her 3 friends and came up to Åre last Thursday for our gig at Åre Sessions. For 2 days we were standing up on the Olympia Plateau and served vegan apple pie with Oatly's yummy vanilla sauce, for 2 days we've gone to concerts and danced till the town got quiet, for 2 days we've promoted our Adventure Stories without actually promoting it, for 2 days I've experienced Åre in a way that I wished happened more often all year round. One of the things you don't get when living here is live concerts, an ocean of people, to dance to the music you like and socialize with friends, people you haven't seen in years and new faces, to get a little city pulse every now and then, for instance. I love the quiet periods too, and I love when the solitary mountain is mixed up with festival!
Except me working on learning to feel meaningful when talking about myself, what I know and what I've done, it was really cozy starting the second morning with a breakfast talk with Magnus Ormestad, Kajsa Larsson och Kristoffer Turdell (the pod will be out on Husky Podcast in about 3w!). It's not really convenient to sit next to a big World free skier winner and a big skiing influencer and say "eeeh, I sleep in tents a lot". Who wants to listen to her haha, and how will anyone understand what I do and why they should listen to me? I couljd just as well say that I'm the first woman in the world to travel all the way around Iceland on a skateboard, that I've been up on Kilimanjaro 3 times as a guide, that I work with Sweden's biggest adventurers, that I slept 200 nights in a tent last year, I could've talked about all my athletic successes and MVP's, that I've reached my dream-combo of adventure + design instead of adventure + 7 jobs on the side to make it work. Malin try to make me "brag" more when we're out guiding with Adventure Stories, I keep forgetting since it's my lifestyle and that's why it feels so self-explanatory (to me). To me it's something I always have to remind myself of, that sleeping 200 nights in a tent every year isn't normal. But I'm learning to talk more about it!
Anyways: THANK YOU Åre Sessions, you're magical! Leg-day reached new levels when we commuted back home from work on a snowboard with a packed 90L bag on my back, a heavy IKEA-bag in my hand and wearing Sorels for boots. Thanks for inviting us and thanks for loving our vegan apple pie, thanks for listening to my talk and thanks for all epic music and dancing!
(Find more pics from the event here)
When the event was over we took some recovery days out on the mountain, we headed straight out on skis to cleanse or heads and breathe fresh air, take a dip in a hole in the ice and got warm again in the sauna, and stayed in a cabin with no electricity for a night. Cabin life is always a good idea, cus when everything takes forever - cooking, get warmth, peeing - the brain gets completely present and you reach the ultimate state of relaxation as you don't have time to think of anything else than just doing what your doing at that exact moment and all other things at home just disappear. Cus if you don't chop wood, make fires, drill a hole in the ice, keep the sauna warm, cook food with simple tools, and take on all your layers to dig your way through the snow to the toilet, you will probably die, get sick or pee in your pants. And then when all that's done it's time to sleep. A night out like that is a super thing to do every now and then and at that moment really tempting to do even more often, so we asked ourselves: "Would you stay here for 6 months if you could, or would you need to get paid? No electricity, no water, no friends - only simplicity."
I know what I would anwser, and that answer is long. But first without trying to influence you, what would you've answered?
