Gifts for our hosts

Before we left Fredrik and Jessica last week, Lauren and I searched for a good bottle of wine from Washington state to leave them as a present. Finally we came across this one from "Heavy Metal Vineyards".  Perfect for your next white elephant party.

Saby gard

Lauren and I arrived at a family farm that my sister visited for a month in 1968. She has kept in touch with the Hannell family for all this time and they graciously offered to host us for a few days.

Our hosts were Goran, who was ten years old when Lindsey visited in 1968; his wife Catherine; and their daughters Frida and Sara. They were extremely generous and included us in all their family meals and parties with their close friends, which was doubly kind given that we were complete strangers who by our presence obligated them to speak English at a time when they might otherwise have gladly not. But they were all patient with us and quite funny. One good joke: a Swedish summer is defined as three weeks of bad skiing.

first meal with the Hannells on their porch overlooking their fields.  A moose crossed in the background  while we ate.

We happened to visit during the midsummer holiday. This is the biggest holiday in Sweden, when families and communities gather to celebrate with each other on the longest day of the year.  In a field outside the local church, we witnessed the raising of the maypole, which became the epicenter of a dance circle including an accordion player singing and playing Swedish songs which were familiar to everyone (except us). At this particular gathering there was also a baking competition, and in our honour the Hannell's oldest daughter created a cake with an American flag as its theme.

Goran and Catherine have an unusual ritual piling everyone  (9 of us in this case) into  a pickup with picnic supplies, then driving on bumpy dirt roads through their farm's pastures to a small raft sitting at the edge of an enormous bay, upon which was a single picnic table where we had our picnic. At this meal Lauren and I were introduced to the combination of a shot of schnapps, chased by a forkful of potato and pickled herring.  We will be shopping at Ikea for these items when we come home.

Sara surveys the raft from the taxi

Lauren, not generally fond of dogs, finds her best friend

a wonderful friend of the Hannells who rode this same bike in a 300 kilometer race in 15 hours, 30 years ago

On the porch outside their farm.

Just before leaving the farm for the last time

Catherine and Sara during our last meal together

Island Hopping

After leaving our hosts we bicycled to downtown Stockholm and boarded a passenger-only ferry which steamed on a 3-hour journey through the Stockholm Archipelago.  The archipelago is an incredible array of literally thousands of islands, some large and inhabited (but usually car-free and accessible only by boat) and others are merely bare rocks just poking above the surface.  The ferry snaked through small channels and then into large expanses of flat sea, then back into intimate passages and back out again, dropping off the occasional passenger and/or supplies in a docking maneuver that took less than a minute.

Our final destination was the island of Uto, and our campground was just outside the town where the ferry docked (one grocery, one restaurant, perhaps 30 homes).  Except for a group of young girls we were the only ones camping.  We quickly pitched our tent by the water and biked to our first beach on the Baltic sea where we read and napped and walked on the sand.  At night we got our first taste of the futility of sleeping this far north; the sun sets around 11pm and then comes back up at 3am when the campground trees filled with squawking wood ducks.  We used earplugs, eye masks, and cocktails of beer, sleeping pills, and ibuprofen but I think stronger barbituates are necessary to combat this problem.

This was taken the morning we left, when we biked to the southern end of the island to catch another ferry.  We were the only ones at the small dock waiting for it.

And this is typically what we had in front of us for most of the day.

Leaving Stockholm

We left our hosts in Stockholm on Tuesday morning and said goodbye outside their house.

Sigge, Jessica, Edith, and Fredrik

Fredrik biked with the kids to day care and so we joined them for the first half kilometer of our trip. Sigge had just removed his training wheels and is now a terror on a bicycle. 

I've seen the needle and the damage done

Stockholm

Today we bicycled through a national park that is practically in our  airbnb host's back yard, and, using an orienteering map to navigate, came out on the other side to a beautiful graveyard that's a World Heritage site.  There are 100,000 gravestones in a pine and hardwood forest, including that of Greta Garbo; we stumbled upon hers by accident during our hour walk through the place.

Weirdly, or maybe appropriately, depending on your attitude, there was a cafe in the middle of the graveyard that served some outstanding desserts.

Stockholm

Lauren and I survived a marathon journey consisting of two plane flights separated by a six hour layover, then a bus-subway-bus combination from the Stockholm airport to our airbnb,  each lugging a disassembled bicycle and all our personal belongings while simultaneously suffering the onset of jet lag.  We had assumed the posture of neanderthals by the time we finished walking the final 500m to our destination. A taxicab might have been smarter but we (i.e. me) were determined to use public transportation.  Lauren will look back on this as the first indication that her traveling companion cannot be depended upon to exercise sound judgement.

Our hosts are thirty something Swedes with a 4 and a 7 year-old and the father and I have much in common, notably that we have both watched many of the same American and Swedish TV shows -- he's a fan of "Portlandia" and I am a fan of "The Bridge".  He had a still-functioning turntable and a  scratch-free collection of LPs retrieved from garage sales; last night he put on Neil Young's "Harvest", which I first listened to under muffin-sized headphones almost 40 years ago when I was  living with my sister in California.  If I had explored his record collection more, I might never have left his house.

We have covered a lot ground on our bicycles and by following our noses have seen much more of the city than we otherwise could by any other means.  We have had to stop frequently to check each other's navigation and have so far prevented ourselves from getting too hopelessly lost. Thank god for phones with GPS, as even with a good bike map it's not been always obvious which direction to go.

 There are masses of bike riders, mostly in casual attire, riding vintage bikes, clunker bikes, hipster bikes, and few if any are in a particular hurry.  There were extremely young riders and extremely old ones. Within the first hour  of our exploring we came upon a father slowly pedaling a bike with his very young daughter sitting serenely in a bike seat behind him;  his wife was nonchalantly bicycling one-handed alongside them, while holding her child's hand with the other. 

Our decision to use AirBnb to stay with a Swedish family has rewarded us.  They live in a town house  15 minutes by bike from the center of the city, and gave us an entire floor to ourselves. We each have our own bedroom,  and they serve us a daily breakfast of homemade bread, hard boiled eggs with a condiment of caviar squeezed from a tube, yogurt with muesli, coffee, and OJ. Their English is impeccable, and their (hilarious) sense of humor is unimpeded even when using  their second language (Jessica the mom speaks another 4 or 5 in addition to Swedish and English). Their kids are adorable, shy at first but warming up more all the time, even though they speak little English themselves.  Upon hearing that I loved dinosaurs when I was her age, the seven year-old  Edith brought a picture  book of them into my room and encouraged me to pronounce "diplodocus" and "stegosaurus" with a Swedish inflection. Today she bicycled 6 to 7 miles round-trip with her parents and younger brother Sigge (he on a bike seat) to an outdoor teenybopper concert;  they got caught in a hailstorm  during their outing but when they got home no one was fazed at all by the inconvenience.  They have given us a glimpse into what looks like an idyllic Swedish family life, nurtured by a system of comprehensive social benefits.  Lauren and I are already angling to immigrate.

So far there have been no disasters other than my constantly being unable to find stuff in my pockets and on one occasion getting locked out of our airbnb for an hour and a half because I had left our set of keys inside. Lauren politely refrained from giving me the stink eye during this and other senior moments.  I have since relinquished the keys, and other tasks requiring half a brain,  to her care.

This is our host's niece at a backyard barbeque, and Lauren, fredrik and Jessica in their back yard.