A couple of days ago, April 22nd, I went on a bicycle ride from Umeå to Holmsund and back, passing through the nature reserve Umeälvens Delta. The whole ride, without stops, was probably about 30km but I of course took the opportunity along the way to map some stuff.

First of all I noticed that my mobile phone, using OsmAnd~, routed me through a closed gate at the Alvik airport so I fixed that and added a node with https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:barrier=gate linking the highway and the fence. All the other gates along that fence that I rode past were properly mapped though, so that made me happy.

A couple of kilometers later, having passed under the relatively newly built Botniabanan I got over Bergöbron and came across a cliff along the side of the E 12 highway, just before turning off onto a parking lot where some tracks led up into the small forest. It was the area for my first waypoint, a bird watch tower and a platform. On my way up I noticed a little bench that wasn’t mapped, and a path leading further into the forest ending up at a nice little bare_rock area with this view:

I met some ornithologists down on the viewpoint plateau nearby and they talked about another platform further down along the delta and curious as I was I asked for directions. Turns out it was easy to find and consequently I registered it in OSM and added the path from my GPX track when I got home.

After that I kept riding along the E12 motorway and started to get pretty hungry. My idea was to treat myself to something nice when I got to Holmsund, so while I did notice some points of interest along the way that could be mapped I didn’t bother stop more than to take a picture or two. I noticed however when I got home that Ume Älvdal has a really good database on historical facts, sights and paths leading me to write an email to the project about licenses, whether there is cooperation with Wikipedia and/or we can make some nice integration with OSM data etc.

There was only a single restaurant (and additionally one café) mapped in Holmsund, so I went to Kajutan to eat the daily special. Given that their menu contained a couple of lacto-ovo-vegetarian pizzas (including as an alternative for the daily special) I also made sure to tag it diet:vegetarian=yes (and also diet:vegan=no because no such alternatives were available). There was also a wireless internet connection available at the restaurant which I have tagged appropriately.

The next waypoint was the starting point for the national cycling network Sverigeleden (4) as well as verifying the new route for the E12 in Holmsund that hasn’t shown up on aerial photography yet. It appeared before my trip that the route started on the actual motorway but when I got there I noticed there was a separate gravel road where the starting point was located. So I made sure the GPX tracks would show how the roads went (remember, no good aerial photography) and then started heading north along the track.

Along the route, heading back home, I noticed some roadsigns, a pizza restaurant (which I mapped), some more cycleways that were clearly separate from the highway and would be beneficial not to just be metatagged. I also found a really weird cycleway that lead across a railway track and didn’t seem to lead anywhere special. The area is probably used during the winter to get out on the ice and therefore a specific crossing is available, but during spring it felt pretty useless. There were no camping sites or firepits or anything (and the ground was much too grassy and full of wet holes for it to be a good place to just chill). Anyway, it had this view:

On the way back to Umeå, through Yttertavle, some rain drops started falling but there was never a real shower. So all in all a really great trip, some good mapping was done and hopefully a good project with Ume Älvdal can be started!