24/06/08 - Who said Sat Nav will never get you lost!!

The weather was not on our side today - especially since we had made
the trip up to the mountains to enjoy the views:-( At the bottom of
the mountain it was very windy and cold, but apparently at the top the
winds were going at 22 metres/second (80km/hr). So with plan A
cancelled, we instead went for a smaller walk around part of the
mountain that had plenty of trees to keep us sheltered. On one hill
we did climb up, we were almost blown straight back off, so we weren't
hanging around!!

Now was time to head back past Ostersund to the coast. We went on a little tikitour on our way to Döda Fallet.Whilst Marea slept,Daniel, being clever, had entered our destination's GPS coordinates into Tomtom. However, it was not until he figured we were a bit lost
and Marea woke up that he confessed that he might just have bypassed a vital formatting option. Very familiar with this particular type of folly, Marea confirmed that Tomtom would have to be formatted to degrees, minutes, seconds format and not decimal degrees.
All mumbo jumbo to most, but tickled my funnybone, that even away from my work,
the same old problems with mapping coordinates are still cropping up.

Prior to the 7th of June 1796, Döda Fallet - translation Dead Falls,
were actually called The Great Falls. So great that the poor
foresters wanting to transport logs, down the river and lake systems
to the coast, would have lost all their logs at The Great Falls as
they "were been smashed to bits like match-sticks". A solution was
needed to get the logs past, so a channel was set up to divert some of
the water down a more gentle path. However still during contruction,
on the night of the 6th/7th, a great spring flood breached the wall
above the channel and emptied an entire lake in just 4 hours -
flooding the farmland below and silencing The Great Falls.

It was quite surreal walking among the dry falls with views of rock
formations carved out by centuries of tumbling water; you don't
normally get to see these at other waterfalls, as they are usually
covered in water.