First proper post here, let me know if it should be placed somewhere else.
My intention with this, and hopefully coming posts, is to describe my journey from zero knowledge of hammocking to wherever it will lead me. Hopefully I may inspire others to try out hammocking while at the same time not bore the more experienced ones to death. I´ll keep my related posts in each thread, but will most likely start separate threads for each "major" step on my journey. Since english is not my first language I welcome your feedback on things like equipment I have a hard time translating or finding the english words for.
First off a bit of a background. I´m Swedish. In Sweden most people think about hiking/trekking as something to be done in mountainous terrain close or above the tree line. We call this general area Fjällen. It looks something like this: A blog in Swedish with some beautiful pictures. Don´t mind the text, just enjoy the scenery.
As you can see, trees are sort of sparse in this type of terrain. In other words, when swedes go camping/trekking/hiking they use tents. Period. In sweden the word hammock is synonymous to something like this. A suspended sofa. We call this "hängmatta", literally "hanging carpet". It´s something that you hang in your garden, you don´t take it with you on your camping journey. My experience of lying in a hängmatta (english term?) is as a child, getting back aches due to its sagginess.
Now, Sweden is also blessed with a number of trails that are more or less maintained by volounteers. Lowland trekking lives in the shadow of its more majestic brother fjällvandring, mountain trekking, but it lives a healthy life. Most of these trails have web sites with varying amounts of information which I´d be happy to link to anyone interested. Here is an exampel of one of the, if not the, largest and most well known trails, Sörmlandsleden.
As for me personally I´m not really a hardcore outdoorsman. My background in the Swedish army way up north gave me a fairly solid knowledge about managing myself in the woods, and on a few occasions mountains, mostly in the winter. Now having children that are growing up, ages soon-to-be-5 and 6,5 respectively, I do strongly feel that taking them, and my wife, into the "wild" will hopefully both teach them a lot of valuable lessons and also bring us as a family even tighter together. Last year my plan of indoctrination began with getting a, in swedish standards, large camping tent. My plan was, and is, that camping must be fun and enjoyable so I start out with a lot of comfort.
During one of those outings where we had the company of our neighbours I had my first experience with what in these forums is called a hammock. Not the 500 pound wooden construction, but a flimsy little thing. More of that after the break (actually my first meeting at work for the day ).
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