THE EASTER RUN
or
ONE YEAR PLUS, ANNIVERSARY TRIP
Early afternoon on the Easter Saturday me and the car rolled out from the parking lot at home. I drove towards Jönköping on the old route 1, in Swedish called “Riksettan” or simply R1. With the help from a 1947 map, in combination with modern and online maps, I had traced the remainders of the old road on to-days road and put it into the navigation app on my phone.
The R1 was the predecessor to to-days E4, and for the most parts the routing is still intact, “slaloming” around the modern highway. When it comes to the towns and cities, thou, that is when it gets very tricky to find the old routing. The old road usually did go through right in the middle of the town centre. Today, the road planners do everything they can to minimise traffic through the towns, and also a lot have usually happened with the town “landscape” during the last 60-70 years. Nevertheless, I tried to stay as close to my interpretation of the original routing as possible, even if I couldn't drive on the exact same streets as the original.
Between Södertälje and Vagnhärad the road surface is good, but the stretch south of Vagnhärad and the whole way to Nyköping is full of cracks, bulges and ruts, due to lack of maintenance, I think. Sometimes I was all-over the road trying to avoid the worst damages…
In Jönåker the old road passes a place called “Kalle i Backen” and according to the legend you should honk your horn when passing, so I did. Although, there is some discontinuity in the steering wheel horn switch, so the signal came a bit late.
Next stop was Hotel Stenkullen, or actually I stopped to look at the road leading up there, since the first part of it probably was a part of the R1 before the highway was built. I remember reading about it in the Swedish magazine Nostalgia many years back. They were also tracing the old road, but in its entirety and from south (Helsingborg) to north (Stockholm); and they found this remainder more or less by chance. It is easily identified as have been part of a major road by because the road surface consists of concrete blocks and the joints between the blocks are very visible.
As the road turns towards the hotel the surface change from concrete to asphalt and the guard rail change from the old wooden type with stone pillars, to a modern steel one. If you look closely straight ahead into the woods instead, you can see the trees and plants growing in a distinct pattern resembling that of the concrete block joints.
The journey then continued to, and through, Norrköping, Linköping, Mantorp and Mjölby. Before I left Norrköping I took a wrong turn and ended up in a housing neighbourhood, but to my surprise I also found what I believe was a stretch of the old road, the concrete block joints were felt in the car and clearly visible through the top asphalt layer.
In Mjölby I realised that I was a bit pressed for time if I was going to make it to my hotel before they closed. So, I got the opportunity to test the Vauxhall in highway speed. Let’s just say that that was not fun after a while so I decreased the speed to a more comfortable level and continued along the highway, being passed even by some lorries (which were not keeping their speed limit).
I arrived at the hotel, just north of Gränna, with some minutes to spare. After checking in I decided I needed some snacks and drove to the nearest petrol station. When turning back to the hotel I adjusted my position in the seat and something went “CRACK”. Then the seat was very loose and it felt like the back rest had snapped.
The next day I drove, with a loose seat, back to the same petrol station to examine the damage and figure out how I could fix it. What I discovered was that the mounting support for the seat, that should be welded to the floor, wasn’t on the driver’s side, and hadn’t been for some time. Someone before me had fixed it with one, or two, self-drilling sheet metal screw! These screws had torn from the flanges of the mounting support and was also loose in the floor.
Fortunately I had a cord-less drill with me and some screws, nuts and washers. However, I had no drill bits, and the petrol station was not well equipped either. But, the re-carpeting job was partly done with self-drilling screws, so I robbed four of them and found four larger washers. Then I removed the bench and used the cordless drill to drill and screw the mounting support back to the floor. Four screws with large washers and adequate spread is better than two randomly placed ones without washers, right?
An hour and and half late I could then head towards Jönköping and the annual Easter car show “Bilsport Performance and Custom Motor Show”. With the camera ready I entered the first of four halls. Many hours later my feats were sore and the show was closing for the day. Over-all the show was not that interesting compared to previous years I've been there .
(If you're interested you can see my photos from the show here: https://photos.hoftware.com/#collection/241194 )
The next morning I was on a mission to find a fellow Super Seven-builder in Vara to get help with machining some parts. So, once again I headed to Jönköping to get around the south end of lake Vättern.
On the way I found a very cool old bridge, and it was in very good shape too. You could see that, including the old bridge and the current bridge, it had been a third one there too, probably even older. I was very glad to see that someone is maintaining the old bridge; the stone-work was in excellent condition and as far as I could tell the railing was newly made in old style.
From Vara I set out to drive the old road north, this time the R6 (“Rikssexan”) that today is E20. I soon found out that this is harder than tracking the R1, because most of the routing of today's E20 is on top of the old R6. There is just small pieces through villages that remain, and you have to drive a lot back and forth between the old and new road. The later the night got the more I got tired of that so eventually I gave up and drove the E20 all the way to Mariefred. From there the R6 is intact to Södertälje.
It was a good trip and nothing major happened with the car. I need, however, to go hunting old roads without any other goal, to be able to stop more and discover. At last I wonder what next year's anniversary trip will go to?