Sweden sort of beat me today. After my having gotten only one good night’s sleep in seventeen days, the rope “pinging” against the flag pole right outside my window kept me up much of the night. I felt lousy as we went to breakfast, and with a six-hour drive back to the east coast tomorrow, I told Mer that I needed a two-hour nap. She was gracious and told me she would go out on her own and come back in a couple of hours.

I settled in to sleep. The hotel clerk had said he would have someone tighten the rope on the pole, so I didn’t hear that. What I did hear was the (seeming) dance party going on in the room above me. It was probably just the housekeeping ladies doing their job, but after thirty minutes, I gave up. I got dressed and headed out to see if I could find Meredith.

I had one solid clue and a deep character understanding. Mer had said she might go scramble on rocks. That was the clue. I also know that my wife has a tourism completism complex. Our hotel clerk had recommended a hike near the hotel that we had meant to do yesterday, but we took the wrong turn and hiked another small peninsula. I knew that since there was a still-pending recommended hike, there was a high chance that Mer would be out on that peninsula.

I headed out that way. The peninsula is small when compared to the whole island, but it’s still really big for trying to run into someone on the ground. I had the advantage of there being no tall ground cover, so I headed to a high spot on the start of the trail and looked around. I didn’t see anyone, but I saw some higher ground, and so I headed up there. When I looked around, I saw across the water on a spit of land a solitary figure that had on a brown coat. That was Meredith. I was most pleased, and with a quick “thank you” prayer, I started waving at her to catch her attention. She was stopped, but didn’t acknowledge me. She moved some and stopped again, so I waved again. Nothing. I started waving both arms wildly. Nothing. Mer started moving again. Sigh. I headed down toward where the blazes went. It took a few minutes, and I started to climb for higher ground again when I heard from below me, “Husband!” Mer had seen my shadow pass in front of her and had looked up. We were happily reunited.

We walked back toward town, taking a different path that hugged a cliff face, and we took our time, looking around. The path led to a swimming area, and then on to a path into the boardwalk section of town, so we walked that. I wanted to see the cute harborside buildings again, and wanted to walk out to the end of the boardwalk. Surprisingly to me, the boardwalk ended but a path kept going. I had thought the boardwalk would end at the sea, but it didn’t. That was fine, and we turned around to go back to the hotel.

We regrouped and then went north in the car about forty-five minutes. The drive was very pretty, with lots of glimpses of water along the way. We drove up to the town of Fjallbacka, which is a small coastal town. It’s very cute in and of itself, but we were there for one reason – to hike Vetteberget mountain using the Kungsklyftan trail.

Mer beat me to the “So this was your Fjallbacka plan, then?” Witty girl.

The trail started on steps, which Mer joked wasn’t very much “clambering” like the last couple of days. Then the stairs ended and gave way to a very rock-strewn path. There. That’s clambering. The path led through a ravine between the bigger mountain and the smaller mountain, and, most fun of all, passed under four huge boulders suspended above the path by being wedged between the two mountains. It was great.

The trail gave over to steep wooden stairs, which I hurried up since they were more or less built into the side of the bigger mountain, and I found the drop-off disturbing. Mer came along behind me, and so we made it to the top of the mountain – or perhaps, more accurately, the hill. It’s only 250 feet high, but it towers over the town and surrounding archipelago. There were wonderful views for about 200 degrees (and the other 160 were of the rest of the mountaintop area, so not bad). We lingered there, soaking in the views. We were also intrigued – there was a large (but small compared to normal cruise ships) National Geographic cruise ship in the harbor. We had no idea how it got in – there were rocks and islands everywhere we looked. The only downside to the afternoon was that the ship set sail while we were on the backside of the hill coming down, so we didn’t see it leave.

After looking about, we decided to go back the back way, which let us see more of the hilltop and more sea views. The trail was longer, but much easier, and ended in a pleasant forest walk that finished on a road that led us back to town.

We went into town to use the bathroom, and I thought we would get something light to eat since it was now almost 2:00. We saw a display on Ingrid Bergman (of Casablanca fame), and so we investigated. It seems as if she had a home on an island near Fjallbacka, and she was a presence in the community. The town named the small square for her and put up a bust of her in the center of the square. We then got some ice cream, which we ate while we looked at the sea, and we called it a good afternoon. We went back to the car and headed back to Smogen.

We dropped stuff off in the room and topped off water and headed out to hike the largest of Smogen’s three small peninsulas. It was about three quarters of a mile away, but we walked there anyway because it was a nice day and I didn’t want to move the car again.

The third hike was the longest, and I think had the highest elevation. It also had the best views to the north of the three. The first half of the hike was over rock and scrub brush and around some small pools of water, so going was slow. After twenty-eight years of staring at my shoulder blades as I walked in front, Mer declared herself “Pathfinder” and led the way. I paused her authority long enough to get us to a platform on the highest point, but a point that was off the blaze-marked trail. Again, the views were wonderful, and we took our time, both at the viewing platform and on the hike itself. The last part of the rocky hike took us over about ten small bridges that helped us cross cracks in the rocks, and it led us to the back half of the hike, which was a fairly level gravel path. We made good time back off the peninsula along the path and headed to supper back at the Barn restaurant again, where we ate outside again in more pleasant weather.

And that ends our touring of Smogen and our west coast stay. Tomorrow we have a long six-hour drive back to the city of Uppsala (the university town we were two weeks ago on a day trip). We might get a little touring in tomorrow in the city, but then on Wednesday we drive to the airport (30 minutes away) and fly home. It’s been a good trip, and maybe we’ll add some more noteworthy things tomorrow. Here’s hoping I sleep better.

Yesterday, Mer proclaimed that she had never clambered around ships until she met me. Today she amended that to simply, “I never clambered until I met you” as we added rocks to the mix.

We left Goteborg to drive the hour-and-forty-five-minute drive to the (somewhat) island of Smogen. Smogen really is an island, but is joined to the mainland by a thirteen-hundred-foot-long bridge, which makes it really easy to drive here. As we got further north from Goteborg, the coast got rockier and rockier. Smogen has lots of bare rock all around the town, and some of it seems to be lunging between houses. I love it.

When we got to our hotel/spa at 11:30, I went in to ask if I could park in the hotel lot, and was told that I could and that our room was already ready. That was happy. We’re in an outbuilding a block away from the main hotel, so we drove there and unloaded the car.

Once situated, we headed back out to go for a hike (one recommended by the guy who checked us in ay our hotel) on the rocky bald areas on the edge of town and overlooking the sea. In doing so, I took the first set of stairs I came to and so inadvertently got on the wrong hiking trail but also stumbled across the hotel’s sea bathing area. It was pretty, surrounded by rock and sheltered by that rock, but it was only about sixty out and so was a little cool. When Mer and I stopped to look in the water a hundred feet on past the swimming area and saw about ten small purple jellyfish, I decided I was good on land. (It turns out the purple jellyfish are harmless, but there is a blue-purple variety that can sting. Who wants to find that color difference the hard way?)

We climbed up onto the rocky headland; it was grand. There was almost no vegetation on the bald, and the sea (along with more rock) was visible in many directions. It was a bit windy, but nothing too bad, and so we set off on the “trail.” Being a bald, the rocky area didn’t have a trail as such. It had a series of white and black sticks drilled into the rock that acted as trail blazes. It was less of a hike and more of a scavenger hunt.

We went all around this hiking area, taking time to sit and soak it all in (but a dry soak). We saw but skipped two blazes when they looked hard to get to and were simply closer to the sea than where we were already standing. We both agreed that seeing the blazes counted. In all, it was about an hour-long hike, and we had a good time.

But because we were staying at a spa (I booked it), we wanted to take advantage of the spa facility; plus, we had massage appointments at 3:00 and 4:00. We got our swimming things and the provided robes from our room (not all of Sweden is a clothes-on sauna experience, but this one thankfully is) and walked over to the main building.

One thing Sweden shares with Iceland is that before you can get in water of any kind in a public space, you have to shower first. So we did that in our respective locker rooms and then went in to the spa.

It was very pleasant. There was a very warm indoor pool, and an outdoor one that I didn’t try. There were three saunas – one hot and dry, one hot and humid, and one with aroma therapy. There was a hot tub and something called a “shower experience.”

We tried the pool briefly, and then the hot tub, but the hot tub has to recover from running for ten minutes and so wouldn’t bubble for us. I was curious about the aroma spa, so I went in there, and Mer followed. I got to the back and saw a button to push for aroma, so I did that just as Mer came in and closed the door. The aroma liquid hit the hot rocks and immediately evaporated, which caused Mer to get overwhelmed by the heat and humidity, so she opened the door, which drew the atomized perfume into the main room and up to the smoke detector.

After about ten minutes, we were let back inside the building, and the hot tub was ready to go, so we tried that, which was relaxing. I only had a few minutes before my massage, so I tried the “shower experience,” which turned out to be walking through six or eight jets of water that sprayed cold water from some and hot water from others, and then you could sit on a bench and have warm water rain down on you, and then the water became downright hot before going back to warm again. I liked it.

I then had my massage, but my masseuse didn’t speak any English, so I got the relaxation massage instead of my normal deep-tissue massage. That was fine, but my back and shoulder knots will needs some attention when I get home to Ohio.

While Mer had her massage, I went back to the hotel room to plan, and then noticed that our church back home was about to start, so I brought that up on YouTube. Mer joined me after her massage (thirty minutes later), so we watched all of the church service together. Then it was time for supper.

We sat outside, but under a covering at the Barn restaurant. Mer, who doesn’t think she’s ever had a lobster roll in Maine, got one at the Barn. She said it was good. My burger and fries worked for me.

It rained some while we were eating, but had stopped by the time we were done, so I decided to go down to the harbor, which was nearby and supposed to be very cute. It was, and the boardwalk all along the shop fronts was really long. It ended in series of red (and a couple of yellow) water-side storage buildings that were backed by huge rock faces, and all in front of the water. It was, to say the least, picturesque.

At the end of the harbor walk, we climbed a set of stairs, to what turned out to be a minigolf course on the edge of a rocky cliff. We may have to try that tomorrow when it’s warmer – the wind was quite cool, and Mer wasn’t dressed for it since we had been only going to supper. We did buy some ice cream to eat while looking at the rocks and sea, but then we headed straight back to the hotel to get warm again.

Today was a mellower day than most of the vacation, but I was glad for the slower pace today. There’s more of the island to explore, and I hope to do that tomorrow. And maybe play some dramatic minigolf where maybe Mer can clamber.

Weather was an issue again today. It’s almost like forecasting the weather in a coastal city on a shallow sea with islands all around is difficult. Last night’s forecast said the rain would start at 1:00 p.m. today. This morning’s said the rain would start at noon. By 11:00 a.m., the forecast said the rain would start at 5:00. I finally just decided to do my thing and see what happened.

The free short-jog ferry only runs during the week, so we took a tram ride to get across the river, ending up in the general area of the Haga neighborhood, where we had been yesterday. It would have been smarter to have thrown in Skansen Kronan yesterday when we were right there, but these things happen on touring trips sometimes.

Before I knew that the weather was going to be all over the place today, I had planned on using the brief window of good weather to climb a hill in the Haga area to get to a small fort called Skansen Kronan, which was built around 1700. The fort isn’t open, but it’s intact and so is interesting to see, and the views from the top of the hill are quite good. We enjoyed the views and stayed for fifteen minutes or so. That was also where I checked the weather and decided I was going ahead with my outdoor plans anyway.

And that meant going down the hill and taking a bit of a walk (right through Haga, of course) to the nearest tram station, to catch the tram we took for forty minutes or so to the end of the line, where we boarded a ferry for the Goteborg archipelago. I figured that even if it started raining, we could see some pretty islands from the ferry, go ashore on the island of Branno, get lunch, and go home. If the weather cooperated, we could keep touring on Branno instead.

The ferry ride out was great. We got to sit on the second floor (deck) of the boat, and we were under the cover of a roof, but the sides were open air. The water rolled by, and we got to see bald granite rocks sticking up out of the water, and then the first green island came along, and it was covered in grass, and we saw some sheep grazing. We stopped at two other islands on the way, and the houses we saw were cute. This looked promising.

We got to Branno and got off the boat in a gentle rain. There didn’t seem to be a main street, or much of a street at all – there were just houses connected by paths. As I consulted my phone to find a cafe, the rain came down much harder. I started thinking of getting lunch and going home, but as we walked to the cafe, the rain stopped.

When I looked for a cafe, I thought it would be a white building with a patio facing the sea, nestled in with other buildings. The cafe we found took some finding. It was behind a construction area and was surrounded by the Land of Misfit Sea Equipment – boats and other gear that was lying around on shore. The cafe itself had good food, but was pretty rustic in the indoor area. It did have a nice roof patio that looked out on the sea, but the rain kept us inside, as it rained again during lunch.

By the time we finished lunch, the rain had stopped, so we hiked up into the lanes/paths to a nature reserve. I wanted to find a lookout I saw on my phone map. After a false start down someone’s driveway, we found a trail that said, in Swedish, “Viewpoint.” Or “Lake trail.” Or “Beware of wild boars.” We took the path, but it didn’t seem to be climbing up. Later, Mer saw a map and thinks the trail led to a lake.

I decided to head back into town to wander, and as I looked at my map, I saw that there was a viewing platform. We clearly needed to do that. We walked up the lanes/trails in a gentle rain, and then we hiked up smaller gravel trails until we got to some stairs, which we took up. They led to the old visual telegraph station, which was on a rocky bald with unobstructed views all around. And the rain had stopped. In fact, we stayed there thirty or forty minutes, and the sun even came out toward the end. We sat looking out to sea or back toward Goteborg, and we listened to the birds sing and the wind move the tree leaves. It was wonderfully peaceful.

I checked my phone and saw that the next ferry we could catch was at 4:00 and then not again until 6:00, so we made our way down, allowing for plenty of time so that, well, we didn’t miss the boat. We made it and had a lovely cruise back to the mainland, where we got on a tram again. About halfway back into the city, the rain came back.

After we got off the ferry, we headed to the Maritiman Museum, Goteborg’s maritime museum made up of ten ships. The museum was open until 8:00, and it was only 5:00, so I wanted to go. The museum has a Swedish destroyer from the late 1950s, which was the first ship to test a ship-to-ship missile. It also has a submarine from the sixties that has a torpedo “revolver” where the crew could quickly rotate the torpedo loader and load four more torpedoes. We also got on board a PT boat used for rescue missions, and (most unexpectedly to me) the museum also has a Monitor-class ironside from 1879. The top bridge is missing now, but the bulk of the ship is still there. That was a great find.

We spent the bulk of our time on the destroyer HMS Smaland. Much of the ship is open to the public to clamber around on, from the engine rooms to the top deck, where the captain would command from. As a side note, Mer mentioned how she had never clambered around ships until she met me, and now she has been on multiple ones. That pleased me very much.

Even on a ship from the late fifties that was in service until the late seventies, life on board still felt crowded. Most of the ladders between decks were very steep, there were lots of places to hit your head or stumble, and many places on ship had exposed moving parts. It seemed as if it would be a rough place to spend weeks at sea.

After the destroyer, we went aboard the submarine Nordkaparen. I love subs – I love the engineering of them and how everything has to be efficient. The Nordkaparen was made in the late sixties but was still using diesel engines to charge batteries for undersea use. The sub could remain underwater for two days at normal speed, but that dropped to two hours at full speed. I found out that the Swedes later developed engines that run on liquid oxygen and so don’t need to charge batteries anymore – the engines are quiet and allow the sub to remain under as long as it has fuel.

The Nordkaparen was really cramped AND was the first submarine I’ve been on where the public has to go down the hatchway ladder, which is vertical and in a tight space. It was great. There were also two pressure hatches in the sub that were 2.5-foot diameter circles that you had to get through. The forward area of the sub had a “six shooter” revolver-style chamber, but was filled with eight torpedoes. With four in the tubes already, that gave the boat twelve total torpedoes to use, and they could be loaded four at a time because of the rotating chamber.

We finished off the tour with a quick walk-through of the Monitor-class ship and the PT boat. The Monitor-class boat was very simple, although I loved that the officer’s cabin had a coal stove in it. You could get on the deck of the PT boat, which only retired in 2001, but that was it – you couldn’t go below decks.

That was a fun museum, and we mostly avoided the rain that came and went by our being below decks on the destroyer and submarine. By the time we came out of the sub, the rain had finally stopped, and the sun had come out.

We went back to our hotel, figuring we would eat there, but the restaurant was fully booked. I don’t think either of us will pass out from skipping supper, but having to do so was a surprise to me.  However, since this is an office area and not a residential area, to get something to eat, we would have had to cross the river again, so I elected to pass on that.

A tower, an archipelago, and ten boats made for a good day, even in the sometimes rain. Goteborg has been a fun city.

Today was a bit of a weather forecast two-step. Yesterday morning when I checked the forecast, it said there’d be rain starting at 11:00 a.m. Based on that, I cancelled the 9:40 walking tour I had scheduled, which was for three hours. It would have been mostly in the rain, which wouldn’t have been much fun. I began looking for indoor things to do.

Last night, the forecast said the rain had moved back to noon, so I started planning outdoor things for the late morning. This morning’s forecast had moved the rain to 1:00, so I focused on my outdoor plan. It was a pretty morning out.

So we left the hotel around 10:00 and boarded the free ferry that runs across the Gota River. That dumped us near the old part of the city, and we started walking toward Kungsportsplatsen, a small square near the river. Along the way, I saw a pretty church, and it had the door open, so we popped inside. It was a church from the 1800s, and it was simple and full of light inside – very pretty. The organist also happened to be practicing, so we sat down and listened to two songs. That was lucky.

We made our way to the square and bought tickets for a fifty-minute canal tour. We joined about forty people on a low, open boat. It turns out the bridges over the canals are really low. We cruised through the canal and out into the river harbor area and back along the canal. We had a young man narrating things to us in Swedish and English, and he was the first Swede I have heard who definitely had flawless English, but with a British accent. He told us that Goteborg was founded in the 1600s by the king in order to have a western port so as to avoid the narrow straits that Denmark controlled and therefore taxed. The whole area was mud flats, so the Swedes had to bring in the Dutch to learn how to reclaim land from the sea. It’s still mud below – the tallest skyscraper (a very cool twisty building) had to sink pylons three hundred feet into the mud to make the foundation stable. Nonetheless, Goteborg is still Scandinavia’s largest port by shipping weight.

After the boat tour, I still wanted to take advantage of the good weather, so we walked south to the Haga neighborhood. The Haga is a cute area of restaurants and cafes down four blocks of pedestrian-only streets, with some residential areas on each side. The cafe street was active with people also enjoying the weather, and we saw some cinnamon rolls that were close to the size of dinner plates (although sadly, the Swedes go for crystalized sugar lightly sprinkled on top instead of frosting).

By now, I wanted lunch and wanted to be back at the ferry dock area for when the rain came, since there were museum possibilities around there. We headed toward the rather wonderful-sounding “Mr. Cake” restaurant. It did indeed have pastries and cakes, but they also served freshly made meals that turned out to be really large; rather than each getting our own dessert, we split a piece of cake, and I haven’t felt any need for supper.

I did check the weather again at lunch, and now the rain had been moved back to 5:00, so it took another quick decision on what to do outside. I felt we should go to Goteborg’s botanical gardens, which are very large (430 acres). They’re easy to get to using a tram, until you get on the one going the wrong way and get off at the next stop, only to find out that the tram you need doesn’t come back this way and you have to walk ten minutes back to the station you started from. Sigh.

We did make it to the gardens, and they were what I was expecting – lush, verdant, well cared for – and as a bonus, it was only six dollars total for both of us to get in. The garden is a mile long and narrow, so we headed toward the far end of the park, stopping to admire whatever caught our eyes. Then I saw some rough-hewn stairs leading up next to a sign that said “Viewpoint.” It was obvious what we had to do. I figured it would lead up fifteen to twenty feet to a little terrace with flowers all around. Ha! Was I happily wrong.

The steps went way up and then led to more steps winding though bare rock. And they kept going. It turns out the heart of the gardens was a large, rocky hill, and the viewpoint was at the top. It was an actual hike to get there. It was great. It looked back at the harbor area and down along the river toward the sea. I was very pleased.

We went back down, managing to get turned around a bit, but still came out where we should. The weather was still fine, so we went on and came to a huge rock garden based around a thirty-foot waterfall cascading down over some of the rocks of the hill. I loved the area. And I saw a sign for “Viewpoint – 50 m,” so we climbed those steps to what must be another viewpoint. Except it wasn’t – it was a much much shorter way to get to our earlier viewpoint than the way we had gone when we were further down.

By now, it was starting to sprinkle, so we worked our way down the path, having covered about two thirds of the main path of the garden. We could have spent another hour or two there if I hadn’t been worried about getting rained on. We actually got on the right tram and got all the way back to the center of town without any real rain, but the radar showed that it was coming soon, so I looked online for things to do. There was only one thing I could find that was open – the Paradox Museum, which was a collection of optical illusions, and turned out to be hosted in a mall. Good enough. We like stuff like that. Off we went, and when we were about half of the way there, it finally started raining.

We did enjoy the Paradox Museum. We laughed quite a bit, and some of the optical effects were quite good (there was a picture that shifted as you moved that was very effective; it turns out to have parts of the painting protrude so the perspective makes it look as if the painting moves as you shift – I thought it was a hologram). It fit the bill. We had a fun time, indoors, and it took us a little over an hour, which got us to the end of the touring day. We had an efficient tram ride back to the hotel, and we got though a day that was supposed to be rainy while still touring fours sights. I’m very happy with that.

Of course, there are showers predicted some tomorrow as well, so I’d better be flexible.

We got to Goteborg (or Gothenburg, in English) today around noon. Goteborg is Sweden’s second biggest city after Stockholm, and I have to admit to a few tense moment of driving in a city where I can’t read the signs. But we’re here, and our room was even ready at noon, so we dumped our stuff before heading out.

Just as Stockholm has an in-city amusement park called Grona Lund, Goteborg has one too, called Liseberg. Liseberg is bigger and has a good-sized hill in the park (which is important). Mer had also determined that this was where we were going to spend this beautiful sixty-degree day.

Liseberg has seven roller coasters – five adult coasters and two children’s coasters, as well as various other rides. Mer wanted to ride all of the coasters, as well as see Swedes at play. The park opened at 1:00, and we were inside at 1:30. Not bad for coming from three hours away this morning.

We did very well today. The park felt busy, but that didn’t translate to ride wait times; those seemed to be running at fifteen to twenty minutes in general. We ended up riding all seven coasters, including one twice, as well as three other rides. So we rode eleven rides and ate two meals and dessert, all in a park that was new to us (so we didn’t always know how to get to the next coaster efficiently).

A brief rundown on my opinion of the coasters, in the order we rode them:
– Stampbanan – (steel kiddie coaster) – A warm-up ride and checklist ride. Nothing too special, except you get to go around the loop three times.
– Rabalder – (steel kiddie coaster) – Great kiddie coaster that goes around twice. It has some real banked turns that are pretty fun.
– Lisebergnbanan – (steel contour coaster) – My favorite, hands-down. I’ve always wanted to try a contour coaster, for which the track follows the contours of a hill. This coaster never gets more than about thirty feet off the ground, but is really long, at two minutes and fifteen seconds. It has some wonderfully kicky corners, including three horizontal loops into the same part of the park. Much fun. We rode it twice over the day, finishing with this coaster as well.
– Luna (steel coaster that goes backwards as well) – This is a fun coaster that backs you up a bit and then uses the hill to generate speed to “launch” you vertically to the moon before going backwards to the station.
– Balder (wooden coaster) – As always, the wooden coasters are rougher than the steel ones, but this one is long, loops around on itself often, and focuses on throwing tons of bunny hops at you. It always alarms me to come out of my seat on a coaster.
– Valkyria (steel coaster with six seats across, letting your feet dangle) – This is a smooth ride, and the highlight is that it holds you for three seconds while you face down the first big drop hill. I had to close my eyes – I couldn’t handle it.
– Helix (steel coaster with 1.75 million inversions) – Oh, my. This was quite a coaster. The track inverts you as many times as they could cram on the course, and it launches you not once but twice while you’re out on the track, including one late in the ride when you think you’re almost done. Then, whammo!:  you cross a launch pad and scream up into an inverted loop. It gets to sixty mph and pulls over four Gs and inverts you seven times – but the twists and turns are such that it feels like a lot more than that. The engineers for this ride are very bad people. I still can’t get over that second launch when I thought the ride was ending.

Since Mer and I are in our fifties and our bodies take time to recover from being turned all around, we need to pace the coasters out. We did three coasters and then lunch. The we did one more coaster and a log flume ride (which, because of the hill, had two lift sections and two downhill splashdowns – we got wet). We did a set of two coasters, then did supper and the Ferris wheel. We then rode a kiddie ride that was a car on an elevated track designed to let you see the park from fifteen feet up. We finished with Helix and then, after dessert, we did Lisebergbanan  one more time, finishing up a little after 9:00. Good amusement park day.

One odd cultural thing for carnival games. In general, instead of winning stuffed animals, you win huge (like three feet long) boxes of various chocolates. You win them on the spin of a wheel instead of any game of skill. These games were very popular. It seemed strange to me to essentially gamble for candy, but people were walking around the park with huge boxes of candy.

So today was a bit of an unorthodox touring day. We’ve been to amusement parks in Europe before, but then we only did an individual ride or two just for the experience. Today was the first time we ever spent a whole day at an amusement park while on one of our European jaunts. We did get to see lots of the city from unusual angles.

Today I had to drive a bit into the unknown. I wanted to go to the cathedral town of Lund, about an hour northwest of Ystad. We had a B and B booked, with parking, but it was a fifteen-minute drive outside of town. My usual plan of dump-the-car-and-walk wasn’t going to work. I knew I wanted to get close to the old town without actually having to drive in it, so I programmed my GPS for the center of the city and then started looking for parking signs as we got close. The end result was okay – a large parking lot, but further from the cathedral than I might have wanted at a fifteen-minute walk. That got us to the church at 9:57 for our 10:00 tour with…

Lund Greeters is the local branch of Greeters International, a group of volunteer city guides all over the world who are local people who love their city and want to share it. They are a no-cost and no-tipping organization. We got to the cathedral and pulled out my travel phone and looked confused enough that Leif and KC (“kay-see”) came over and asked us if we were looking for them. KC is from Colorado, but married a Swede and has lived in Lund for thirty years, and Leif, from the northern part of Sweden, went to college in Lund, met a local girl, and married her and stayed.  Both KC and Leif were retired (or at least of retirement age) and were vibrant and energetic people. They led us around the old town for three hours without slowing down, and again, all for free. Amazing people.

A few highlights from the tour:
– The cathedral dates back to the 1100s, but didn’t have enough money for upkeep after the Reformation, so buttresses started being put up to hold up the Romanesque walls. An architect in the 1800s fixed the roof and rebuilt the front towers (which impressively match the rest of the church) and ditched the external supports.
– The university here has 30,000 students and is the second oldest in Sweden, next to their rivals in Uppsala. For a town of about 100,000 people, that’s a large student population.
– Students have to find their own housing – the university doesn’t have any. That led to frat/sorority-like co-ed housing called “nations” where students from the same regions house together.
– The university students have a great sense of humor. After the town carried on forever trying to decide what statue to put in the square between the cathedral and a university building, the students had a large and official unveiling of nothing. They put a plaque on the ground with the title Nothing, and it stuck. The town liked it because it cost, well, nothing. At some point, the cathedral folks pulled it up to do some cobblestone renovations, and the student group put another plaque nearby proclaiming that Nothing had been stolen.
– The university also has a collection of casts of noses, started by a student casting his own nose back in 1986. Every year, a couple or a few people connected to Lund are chosen to have their noses added to the collection, including famous people like a woman professor who won the Nobel Prize in physics – the cast-makers walked into her class after the class was done and asked her to lie down to get her cast made. They’ve recently added audio of some of the people sneezing so you can hear the nose. Some casts are recreations, including one for Tycho Brahe, and they included a brass band across the plaster of his nose. I loved that (he is supposed to have had a fake brass nose).
– Near the cathedral is a gorgeous pharmacy, where everything inside is carved of wood, including the names of all the head pharmacists going back to the 1600s. When it was thought that the pharmacy might have to close because of costs a few years ago, the normally tranquil Swedes protested out front and saved the business. It’s a work of art to see the inside.
– A farmer who was digging for a new pigsty hit some iron objects on a site about three miles south of Lund. It turned out to be a lost town predating Lund, and the area of interest is huge. Less than one percent has been excavated.
– The town used to have twenty-two churches (for about six thousand people). All but two were torn down after the Reformation, and two were rediscovered, one wooden and one stone, when the town was trying to build a parking lot in the 1980s. Nothing now remains of the wooden one, but the outline is shown in the cobblestone. The stone church’s foundation was preserved in the publicly accessible basement of a new building.
– KC and Leif made sure we were at the church to see the six-hundred-year-old astronomical clock perform. Two knights at the top strike at each other with their swords, once for each stroke of the hour. Then four servants and the three wise men process around Mary and Jesus while two trumpeters play the tune to “Good Christian Men, Rejoice.”

It was a fun tour, and we got to ask lots of questions, including asking how things went in 1967 when Sweden decided to change from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right-hand side of the road on one day. Leif said it had been well planned, and the Swedes are rule-followers, so it went fine. As someone who doesn’t love driving on the left, I’m grateful.

Leif and KC left us around 1:00, and Leif recommended we go eat at a local place about ten minutes up past the church. We value local information, so we walked there and were told we could order at the bar. The menu was in Swedish, and the bartender kept serving other people drinks over helping us, so we gave up there. The second place we tried was a cafe, but it was going to be twenty minutes for the bread to come out. Our third place was an Italian cafe, and we finally got a pleasant lunch, seated outside in an inner courtyard.

After lunch, we went to look in at the cathedral. It’s free, even to go into the crypt. In fact, we didn’t pay for any touring today anywhere – everything was free. While most of the church is plain, above the choir area, there is a huge and impressive mosaic of Jesus calling his saints out of their graves on the Last Day. After we toured the crypt, we sat and looked at that for some time (and we were hoping that a group in the choir area was going to sing, but it never did).

The crypt was interesting – some graves of important people were in the floor or on the walls, but what was new to me was that many of the supporting pillars holding up the roof of the crypt/floor of the church were carved with figures or patterns. I liked that touch.

From the cathedral, we wandered east to the botanical garden. We both like gardens, and I had seen this recommended on a couple of websites. We got there, and it was free (sponsored by the town and university). The early results were a bit disappointing – the garden was basically a park – nice, but just grass and trees and shrubs. We got around to the other side of the (under construction) main central building, and things picked up. There were beds of flowers, and then the paths started winding thought flowering shrubs and around small undulations of rock and plants. That was more what I was expecting.

We came across some teens on a lawn throwing wooden rods at wooden blocks. It became clear they were playing a game, so we sat down to see if we could figure out the rules. We’re still not sure of all the rules, but it seems as if the goal is to knock down all of the other team’s blocks, and then knock down a central block, which it seems had to be done by throwing the rod while you were bent over and looking through your legs. We suspect that this last part may have been house rules.

I then took us to the university library, which was an okay library with one really cool wooden silent-study room that was lined with old books. The outside of the building was very picturesque too, but I’m not sure why my research found sites saying it was a “must-see.” Still, lead an English teacher to books and she’s impressed.

My last touring adventure of the day was to go see the elaborate interior of All Saints Church. It took between ten and fifteen minutes to get there, and we discovered that the church was in use for a graduation ceremony. Ah well.

Speaking of graduation, today was high school graduation, at least in Lund. We kept running into hordes of students wearing white graduation caps, and then at some point, most of them piled into the backs of huge semis that drove them slowly though the streets for a couple of hours while they played loud music, yelled, blew whistles, waved, and generally seemed to be having a good time. Odd tradition to an American, but it was festive.

We ate supper at an Italian restaurant we had passed during the tour, selecting it from the smell alone. It was a bit pricey, but worth it.

We found our car again by comparing landmark notes with each other, and drove out to our B and B, which is in an odd area. Much of it is farmland, but there are two large business headquarters-looking buildings of metal and curves. There are roundabouts where there’s only one street coming in and going out, so they seem to be ready to be expanded for future plans. There’s  a new rail station, but the tracks don’t go anywhere yet. And our B and B is on a three-quarters-of-a-mile-long single-track dirt road. I’m guessing the area is in the early stages yet of transition.

Tomorrow we continue going back north, going to Sweden’s second-biggest city, Goteburg. Mer will be in charge tomorrow, so I get a break from planning.

Today was an ebb-and-flow kind of day. The rain came and went and came and went and came and went. My touristic planning went from plan to improvise to replan and reimprovise. The touristic results went from wow to ehh to okay to wet to okay to good to okay to good.

The forecast called for rain in the morning, but that was easy, since I had indoor plans until 11:00. Online, I had stumbled across a cello player in the region named Petronella Torin, whose website had a “book me” link, so I got in touch. She was willing to play and sing Swedish folk songs for us for an hour, and for a rate that was more or less in line with good seats at a Cleveland theater.

That was a fun time. Mer and I have never been to a private concert before, and Petronella was affable, taking time to explain the cello and what the songs were about. She warmed up with two Bach pieces which she played deftly, and then she played and sang for the rest of the time. Her cello is over two hundred years old, so the sound is full and rich. She took time to answer our questions, and we really enjoyed the entire experience.

Petronella had mentioned a waterfall in one of the stories of her songs, and it was nearby, so we went to see it. It was in a small nature preserve, and when we got there, it started drizzling, even though we’d seen no rain since heading out today. But the path was in a leafy forest, so the rain mostly didn’t get in. The walk was in slightly rolling hills and in the woods, so it was nice in a Cuyahoga Valley National Park sort of way. When I saw that one path looked as if it led down to the stream and was very muddy, and I didn’t know how long the other trail was, I decided to take the shorter inner loop and go back to the car. I wasn’t sure it was worth the touring time.

The rain had stopped, and I drove the short way on to Vik. One website I had read had mentioned a couple of coastal towns as being cute to wander in, so that was my itinerary for the day. Vik turned out to be a tiny hamlet of one-way roads that led to a parking lot that had a path to the sea. The “beach” was made up of rocky slabs, although we could see sandy beaches further up the shore. Oddly, on a sometimes rainy, windy, fifty-degree day, we were the only ones on the beach. We found a rock and sat and watched the waves for a few minutes. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t a main street to wander down, so I checked my next two towns. One was even smaller, but Simrishamn had about seven thousand people, so we drove there.

We parked near signs for the harbor, and as we got out of the car, it started sprinkling again. Since the forecast hadn’t called for any rain, neither of us had umbrellas, but we did have rain jackets, so we were fine with showers. We walked along the harbor, which was oddly isolated, and headed in the direction of town (away from the very extensive beach). The more we walked, the heavier the rain got. As we got to the main street of the town, I was pretty much looking for any place to eat that was under cover. We found one, and got settled outside under a canopy when the rain intensified to a full-on steady rain. I told Mer to take her time eating.

By the time we were done eating, the rain stopped. We took the improved weather as a chance to explore the town, but it wasn’t very extensive – a couple of streets of nice shops and a few cute homes. We headed back to the car, keeping right on the shore of the sea, and we discovered a small, pretty seating area and got a better look at the rain-free harbor. When we got to the beach, we walked out on it for a short distance, but we didn’t go very far because the sand was very hard to walk in.

I was determined to do better, so I headed us back to Kaseberga, where we had seen the ship stones the night before. We hadn’t seen the pier or the town, so I wanted to correct that.

I’m glad we went to see the stones last night. When we pulled in to the parking lot at 3:00, it was pretty much full and included a couple of buses. We walked into town and then down the road to the pier area, which was away from the town, since the town was built behind the cliff top, presumably to keep it out of the wind. On the way down, we spotted four windsurfers out on the water doing their thing. They were having a good day of it today with pretty high winds.

We walked along the base of the pier, which was made up of restaurants, a cafe, a few souvenir shops, and a small fish shipping warehouse. We then walked out to the end of the pier, where we watched much more active waves and had a fun time watching the various windsurfers. One man rode right by us on his way in to the shore, and his board was about two feet out of the water, with only the stabilizer still under the waves. It looked fun.

We walked back up to the car and stumbled across the surfer as we went though the town. We told him we’d had fun watching him and asked him how long he had been surfing. He smiled and said, “A long time.” That was why it looked like fun – he knew what he was doing.

And so back to Ystad. As we got back to the hotel, it started raining again, so I took thirty minutes to do some work stuff. We went to wander the town randomly to see what we could find. We found several cute houses and a few half-timbered ones that were clearly old. We happened upon the old monastery, which is now a town museum, and the grounds and gardens around the building were pretty. By then, it was 6:00, so I found us a place to eat on the square, and we were the only ones sitting outside at the pub. The food was good, but so was sitting in such a pretty place.

After supper, we wanted to explore more of the town, so I downloaded a map from the tourism bureau. It showed twenty-two buildings to find, but they were all in a weird order, so I decided  just to look at the ones we happened to be close to. We started with the theater, but were puzzled how to find it when it dawned on us it was the building we were standing in front of with our backs to it. It mentioned an elegant facade, so we went around the building to see it, finally getting to it on the fourth try.

We then failed to find the old Latin school building immediately, and then laughed when the front had a large sign identifying it. We had trouble making the map line up with St. Mary’s church, and then we went all around the old city hall before finding the front and verifying that it was what we were looking for.

We ended up going down a long pedestrian street just to see it, but it took us to the longest half-timbered building street in the Nordic countries (almost a whole block long). There was another old (1700s) half-timbered building around the corner from it was well.

Our phone-guided tour had taken place in a little rain at the start, but by the end, the day was very sunny and pleasant. It was a good way to end the day – seeing sights and laughing at our own foolishness at missing obvious buildings. Tomorrow we start heading back north, but along the west coast side of Sweden this time.

Today was another travel day of about three-and-a-half hours as we went from Kalmar to our next hotel in the southern coastal town of Ystad. The next stop south from Ystad is the German/Polish border.

I decided to break the drive up by adding thirty minutes of driving to the trip. Odd, but it broke the trip up into (roughly) two-plus hours for the first part and one hour and forty-five minutes for the second. That was worth it to me, especially when the stop was the Wanas Konst sculpture garden.

Meredith and I love sculpture gardens. We swing by them any time we get close to one. Seeing sculpture outside on a nice day is a real treat to both of us. Wanas Konst is a bit of an oddity in that it’s across the street from a working (and tourable) farm, and it isn’t really close to any major towns. Somehow it has managed to be open for forty years and continues to add sculptures to the collection, which now has over eighty sculptures spread over forty heavily wooded acers.

We got there about 11:30 and finally left at 3:30 and still didn’t get to see everything. Wanas Konst is now my favorite sculpture garden anywhere. The grounds are gorgeous – about a third of the grounds is manicured ponds and lawns around a large private residence (the owners of which allow the sculpture garden to reside on their land as a donation), and about two thirds is wooded. Many pieces of art can be interacted with. We sat on a curved bench and a black rocky sculpture. We climbed a tall wooden ziggurat and admired the views from the top. We had fun swinging on swings suspended from various heights from a tall tree. We walked through a ball pit that filled a black door that went into the ground. I mildly hurt myself on a set of four closely spaced swings that were designed to have people swing in unison; I hit the swing in front of me fairly hard. We looked through a periscope to see the palace. We played huge windchimes suspended from a metal-frame jellyfish wrapped around a tree. 

Some of the art was odd – there was a creature with a lion’s body, two tails, and a feathered neck with no real head, and it was standing in a large nest in the water. There was also a 150-by-150-foot space in the woods enclosed by a fence so that the forest could be undisturbed art. But most of the are was fun or thought-provoking. Meredith and I both loved a piece that was a net suspended in the shape of a movie theater screen and covered with sequins. They moved in the breeze, so you could see the forest behind the net shimmer. We sat and watched that one for several minutes.

There was a smooth, round, polished stone piece sitting in the middle of stone fragments of an eggshell; it looked as if it had just hatched. One artist made an replica of a New York museum, but shrank it down to a (still colossal) outhouse. There was a metal strand strung across a pond, and the strand would expand and contract with the temperature, so its height above the water was always changing.

One thought-provoking piece was an American-style narrow building that suggested a church. From a speaker in the building, a poet’s voice read short excerpts of his work, while outside the building, high up in the trees, some peaceful music played. It was the artist’s tribute to the poet, who committed suicide at the age of eighty.

The model and actress Isabella Rossellini had several video installations in the park in odd places; for each video, she had filmed herself pretending to be a bug or animal and dressed herself up to show the mating and/or survival behaviors of the animal. They were quirky.

I loved how the art integrated with the trees of the forest. It felt like nature trails with surprises scattered throughout the walk. I absolutely fell in love with the place, and I’d love to go back to see it in different seasons (and see the ten or fifteen percent of the park we missed).

From Wanas Konst, we drove on to Ystad. We checked in to our hotel, which is in, at least partly, a building from 1793. After we got settled, we had supper at Thor’s, but oddly, Chris Hemsworth didn’t wait on us. I guess he was in the kitchen.

It was a perfect evening – cool and with a light breeze, and some sun coming through a layer of clouds. Since the weather was so agreeable, I did the rare thing of getting back in the car after I had parked it in a town, so that we could drive twenty-five minutes to Ales Stenar. Or so I thought. The drive got us to a parking lot, from which there was a fifteen-minute walk up to the stones. That was okay – it was a pleasant walk, and made the stones get revealed more slowly.

Ales Stenar is the largest stone ship monument/grave/meeting-place/we-have-no-idea that is preserved in Sweden. The rocks are all five tons or so, and the fifty-nine stones in the monument are arranged roughly in the outline of a ship. The monument is set dramatically on a small cliff, and since we got there after 7:00, we had the place almost to ourselves – there were usually four or five other people around, but not always in and around the ship. The clifftop itself was a grand place to sit and look at the sea and flowers and sun and the other gentle cliffs of the area, and that was exactly what we did for ten minutes or more as the gentle breeze blew on us and kept bugs away, and the light surf lapped the shore, sending up the sound of the waves, but only if you were within ten feet of the cliff; otherwise, it was very still around the ship stones. I was happy on the clifftop – what a mellow and peaceful place to end a day of beauty.

We headed back to the car and back to Ytsad. It was a great travel day when we got to see two unusual sights. We’re in this area tomorrow, so the drives should all be fairly short. I’m looking forward to seeing more of the southern Swedish coast.

Mer let us sleep in this morning until 8:30 since we’d had such a long day yesterday. That was a welcome decision. I’ve been having trouble sleeping this vacation (oddly, usually because our rooms have been too hot when it’s been fifty degrees outside), and getting a decent sleep was needed.

After a rather extensive breakfast where we also got to sit outside on a sunny day (but in the shade, of course), we headed off to church. Meredith had found another Pentecostal church that had live English translations, and it was about a fifteen-minute walk away. It was called Lorensberg Church, and we found it with about four minutes to spare.

It was a lovely service. The entire thing, including the songs, was all in Swedish, which, to me, is how it should be for any church that isn’t trying to minister to international people. Our translator did a fantastic job, and he even translated the lyrics of the songs for us. The sermon was given by an elder since the pastor was out of town, and he spoke on what baptism and “living in your baptism” means. It was a solid sermon.

Sometimes Pentecostal churches can be a little wild for outsiders – they can be very emotional, and interactive, with lots of raising of hands and verbal affirmations from the congregation. Lorensberg Church was very much on the “tame” end of the spectrum and was pretty much what we’re used to back home. There was a lot of speaking in tongues, but I’m pretty sure it was all Swedish.

I did crack myself up. During one song, I saw some English cognates in the song, so I was excited to follow along with, “You are my hope, You are my life, You are my filbblegibbit.” There was a disconnect there toward the end.  Some Swedish words are similar to their English equivalents, but others, not so much.

After the service, a retired man came up to speak to us, and he used very solid English. He invited us to stay for “fika,” which is the Swedish term for coffee and light food. We were happy to stick around, and he pointed out a man sitting outside who had lived in Dallas for a couple of years, and he had been the guitar player for the church service today. Mer and I went up to him and introduced ourselves, and we chatted for a long time. A couple of other English speakers joined us and chatted with Meredith, but I kept talking to Par (the guitar player) about guitars and his line of work. He and his son spent six months building a guitar from wood sourced from family property, which is very cool. He was a quality control engineer for Ericsson, which had a factory in Dallas, which is why he lived there for a couple of years. Meredith and I had a great time getting to talk to locals. We finally thanked everyone and left around 1:30.

We got changed and organized back in the room, and then headed out, driving to the island of Oland. Oland was connected to the mainland by a nearly four-mile-long bridge back in 1972, so it makes for an easy drive. We were aiming for the largest town, Borgholm, about forty-five minutes away.

It was a pleasant drive, except for the unsettlingly tall bridge we had to cross. The island does have dozens of old-style wooden windmills scattered all over, and even a few modern ones as well. The old ones no longer turn in the wind since the arms aren’t covered in cloth.

Just before the town, an old semi-ruined castle broods on a cliff overlooking the sea. It’s very weird in that the roof is completely gone, but the rest of the stone structure is intact. Usually at least a wall or two is damaged, but not in this case. We turned off at the castle drive, but kept going past it and on to Solliden Palace, the summer escape home for the royal family. The home is closed to the public, but the gardens are open.

We only had two hours to closing time, but while the grounds weren’t tiny, they weren’t extensive. We saw everything in about an hour and fifteen minutes. The gardens were quite lovely, and everything was heavily shaded. The garden had a very cool three-tier fountain waterfall, and there were classical statues scattered around, and some modern sculpture as well. There was a large art installation in one part of the grounds that celebrated a husband-and-wife team of artists who are well known in Sweden. The wife passed away in 2018, but the husband is still making art at age eighty-eight.

One of the more random features of the garden was encountered as we came along a road on the back of the public area:  we saw some small gates set up in a circle that looked like a mini show-jumping ring, like in the Olympics. I joked that it was for horses, and then we saw that there was a rack of hobby horses for little kids. The course was for them, so of course we tried it, stepping over the taller gates so as not to fall over ourselves. Mer decided that the hardest thing was keeping the horse stick between her knees.

The last major exhibit in the garden was a series of photos of the royal family, mostly at Solliden. The king and queen have been married for fifty years and the king turns eighty this year, so it was a celebration of the family. Many of the photos were taken by the family or even the king himself. From an outsider’s perspective, the family seems to be fairly normal, if a bit richer than your average Riordan.

After the gardens, we went back to the car and drove back to the ruined castle. It was now almost 4:30, so there wasn’t any point in paying for admission, but we did get closer to the walls, and also looked out to sea some. We investigated a huge cairn that was put up as a memorial to a king from the 1800s by his hunting buddies. We then drove on to town.

It turns out that Borgholm is a very quiet town of a Sunday. We parked by the sea and then walked up to the four-block-long main pedestrian street. There were a few restaurants open, but that was it; no shops were open. There was only a handful of people about. It was a cute street, and the city hall was a cheerful bright yellow. We liked the walk, but it was strange to see a European shopping area so nearly deserted.

Sadly, toward the end of the walk, I started having stomach cramps. I have no idea what I ate today that made me sick, but I found a pay-for bathroom and was in there long enough that Meredith came over to the door to ask if I was okay. Once I was fit for traveling, we drove the forty-five minutes back to the hotel, where I was cramped up again for a time. And then again after supper while still at the restaurant. It wasn’t food poisoning, which I had last year, but it was a reaction to something I ate, or possibly dehydration (I probably didn’t drink so much as I normally do today). It was a bit frustrating, because I’d wanted to wander around in Borgholm or at least back here in Kalmar, but I felt I needed to stay near a bathroom. And the worst of it is is that I don’t know what caused it, so I could end up doing it again tomorrow when I have the same breakfast options.

Still, a rough ending of a day doesn’t negate the good of the rest of the day. Church was excellent ,and we got to meet some locals, and then the gardens on Oland were a happy place to wander around in. Tomorrow I take over again for the next several days, and we head further south in Sweden.

When Meredith and I tour a country, we like to see as much of the country as we can efficiently manage while still actually seeing sights – no pulling up and taking a photo and driving on to the next place. But when you have large countries, say, like Sweden, you sometimes have days made up largely of travel. Especially when you pin yourself out on an island two-and-a-half hours from Stockholm, where the rental car is. Today was a fairly long in-motion day, but we managed to interspace some touring into the boat, bus, foot, and car travel.

We got up early at Sandhamn to catch the first ferry out, which left at 8:40. The only ferry that goes all the way to Stockholm leaves at 3:00 p.m., so we couldn’t wait for that. We took the fifty-minute ferry to an island that had bridge connections all the way back to Stockholm so that we could take a bus back, getting to the city about 11:00. It was raining in the archipelago, but only lightly. Mer found that the back of the boat had a very small outside deck that was covered by an open upper deck, and that there were two dry chairs back there. So we sat out on the deck and watched the islands and the sea roll by. Even with the rain, the water was calm, and the trip was still beautiful. That counted as some tourism on a travel day.

We caught the bus and rode fifty minutes into the city. The bus was really hot, and I had awakened with a stiff neck that sometimes can trigger stomachaches and migraines. I treated the neck, but was left feeling fragile, healthwise. Between the bus’s heat and its swaying, my stomach got really upset. Mer saw that and suggested we ride an extra stop to get close to Gamla Stan, where we could walk outside rather than take another bus to the train station to the car rental building. I quickly agreed.

So, even though we were schlepping luggage with us, we walked back into the old town of Stockholm. That was some touring in itself, but we got a light lunch outside of a bakery on the main square, where we sat across from the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prizes. That was fun. As we left the bakery, we heard music and investigated, and saw some helmet plumes over the heads of a huge crowd; it was the ceremonial changing of the guard at the in-town palace. We didn’t stick around, since we couldn’t see very well, but that was cool to almost see.

The walk to the car rental place wasn’t too exciting, but we did manage to see a small square near the main square that we hadn’t seen before. We had left the rain back on the outer islands, and the day was a pretty one for walking. The food and walk cleared up my head and stomach nicely.

It took about thirty or forty minutes to get our car (there was a line of people being helped by only one worker for a long time), but we got the car and got underway. It wasn’t a terribly scenic drive, but it went smoothly, and we finally pulled up to our hotel in Kalmar, about five hours south of Stockholm, at 6:30.

You would assume that at 6:30, after about eleven hours of our being in motion, we would get some food and go to bed. But, as readers know by now, I travel with Meredith, and it doesn’t get dark here until about 10:15 p.m. We did get some fantastic food, at a restaurant in the city center called Symposium, but then we toured another two-and-a-half hours. Make hay while the sun shines.

It was a perfect evening – cool and with a few puffy clouds. Kalmar is right on the Baltic Sea, and so there are water views from all along the park on the eastern side of town. The town also has a castle, with a dry moat and a water-filled moat, so this is a fun place to wander. Which we did. We saw a small glassed-in gazebo operating as a small art museum showing the works of an artist who worked on the nearby large island, Oland. We popped over to the castle and looked in, but decided not to crash the very swanky-looking wedding reception going on. We did walk up on the outer walls and look out over the sea, which was quite pretty.

From there, we trekked out to the pier, where we were surprised to find several teen boys swimming in the sea on this sixty-degree day. Carpe swimming – swim while you can, I guess. We then wrapped up the touring of the day with a long stroll through a park out to the island park of Stenso. Between the sea on one side and the park on the other with the cool evening, it was a pretty wonderful stroll. On the way back to the hotel, we went through the town instead of going along the shore, and we admired the red and yellow homes, the well-kept yards, and the flowering trees and shrubs.

On a day of about seven-and-a-half hours of travel, we managed to do some five hours of touring, That’s not something I’d want to do every day of any trip, but it does get us to see more of the country. Welcome to the far south of Sweden!