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.