“Find some nice people and sit close to them.”

The man who told me this was tending a fire in the middle of a Swedish forest, the flames that illuminated his graying blond locks making him look like a hippie Viking. On the embers in front of him, he had laid a pike perch caught earlier that day in a nearby lake.

I did not feel like finding some nice people. I had left sunny Copenhagen hours earlier, expecting to arrive at Stedsans in the Woods in southwestern Sweden by midafternoon, with plenty of time for