Last bits of Sweden

We returned to Stockholm for one last day via Sigtuna - Sweden’s oldest town founded in 980. After a great lunch back at Ruby Bistro in the old city, we took the ferry to Gröna Lund and spent the rest of the day on roller coasters, carousels, swings, bumper cars, and other modes of pointless but thrilling transportation. The highlight of the evening for me was the Eclipse - a four hundred foot tall pole with 26 foot long swings attached to the top. The swings move at 43 miles per hour, and the top swivels and tilts for additional excitement. Vivian thought it was ho-hum but she enjoyed the view from the top. Both she and Evan were however impressed with the Vilda Musen - a wild bobsled style coaster that tossed and turned you in every direction.

We ended the evening with giant cotton candy and rode the ferry back to Skeppsholmen to find that we had a parking ticket on the rental (we parked in a marked spot and paid for parking, so we still don’t understand why). 

We woke up to a dreary morning and headed for Arlanda airport. By the time we were ready to board our flight, it was raining hard outside and the temperature was twenty degrees cooler than the day before. Looks like our luck with the amazing weather had run out - just in time. After about eight hours in the airplane we landed in Newark and bid Jo good bye. The kids and I caught a short flight to Boston, hopped on the Silver Line at Logan and met Alu at South Station, starting the next part of our vacation. While Jo hung out at Newark airport for hours with a delayed flight and eventually rebooked and arrived at Austin and the white wooden house well after midnight that night.

ps. at Gröna Lund the restrooms are unisex. Everyone standing together in a large room with sinks along one side and stalls along the other three. Trans people were probably rampantly raping everyone else while I wasn't looking. Americans, beware. 

Leaving Bonhamn

On our last day in Bonhamn we went for a hike along the coast towards the north. After passing over a rocky hill we descended down on the other side to a gravely beach. Nora and Evan built a fairy home in the sand out of rocks and twigs while Vivian and Felix, now predictably, shed their pants and waded around in their underwear. Chris and I hiked up past the point to where there was a small lighthouse and then everyone had one last snack (literally - because we had worked through our groceries and alcohol to almost the last morsel and drop) on the warm beach before walking back to the village.

In Sweden you clean up the place before you leave - not just pick-up but a good clean. Jo vacuumed and cleaned while the kids played and I packed. Nina and company did the same. The owners came by at about 2pm so we could pay them and give them their keys. While chatting with them via Nina I asked if anyone lived in Bonhamn during the winter. The gentleman, who was well into his eighties vehemently said yes and Nina translated that during the last winter 13 to 15 people had remained at the village. The lady added that they (she was over 80 too) had skated out to Högbonden Island while the sea was frozen over. 

The kids took one last walk over to the rocky outcrop on the other side of the bay and picked up a few tadpoles in a jam jar that Felix and Nora said they would take back home to Uppsala. They bade Polliwog Ranch a tearful good bye. We walked past the beautiful old fishermen homes and wondered why we were leaving. As we drove off to Uppsala we promised we’d come back.

Manaminne and Where The Rock Can Be Seen

On our third day in Bonhamn we decided to visit a section of the coastline near by that was composed of flat granite. The granite had a beautiful reddish tinge and was almost silky smooth to the touch. Large slabs of rock ran right up to the sea's edge. Evan, Vivian, Nora and Felix ran around like lunatics on the smooth rock and played in clear shallow puddles while we grumbled that the place was overrun by tourists (there were at least half a dozen other people within sight at times).

The Sami people used to bring herds of reindeer - as many as a few thousand strong through here a century ago, often in winter so the reindeer could lick the brackish salty ice. They had a name for the route to here: gaelnoe, which means “steep pine or spruce covered hill, where the rock can be seen”. How’s that for not being vague? 

For lunch we drove up to Manaminne. Manaminne means memory of man (or something like that). It is called a museum but it is a strange collection of buildings, pavilions, large objects like trains, ships, a fighter jet, and works of art, scattered over the side of a hill near Nordringa. The lunch was delicious and we ate it outdoors at the museum restaurant and then the kids aimlessly wandered around, pushing a locomotive, crowding into a vintage phone booth, and playing accordions. Then we hiked up a very steep trail to the top and enjoyed the amazing view. The lakes in the background are slowly getting cut off from the sea one at a time as the land around them rises.  

Högbonden Island

Högbonden is an island about two miles from Bonhamn. During the height of the tourist season (when, I assume Bonhamn bristles with people) there is a daily ferry to the island. But we are here before that so Nina called a local fisherman and he agreed to take us out to the island and pick us up when we were ready. At about 10:30 in the morning we found ourselves on a rocky craggy little island with a lighthouse on top, and a restaurant where Nina had special ordered lunch for us a week before. The kids quickly found tadpole pools to entertain themselves with. We found a sauna hut but didn’t fire it up.

We walked around to the treeless rocky side of the island where thousands of gulls and ducks and geese nested. Vivian and Felix counted about a hundred eggs laying on the rock or in very shallow nests. Here’s a photo of a beautiful speckled specimen with a little dried fish waiting beside the egg for the young one.

We climbed back up and hiked towards the top of the island. The kids found an unused cable car system that had been used a long time back to build the lighthouse and to bring in supplies for the families that lived up there. Jo and I joked that this would be the perfect deserted island for our episode of Naked and Afraid (we’ve never seen the show but have heard enough about it to talk like pros). And then we walked around the last corner before the lighthouse and ran into a large group of people (ok - six or eight) sitting around and sipping coffee - apparently there for a yoga retreat. 

A bit disappointed, we nevertheless enjoyed a great lunch and coffee and dessert and then the sun came out (we were freezing during lunch - everyone except Evan who opted to stay in his t-shirt) and we found a beautiful deck and lay around for an hour or longer and ate chocolate. Then we called our fisherman friend and hiked back down to the pier and hopped on his boat. The sea was a bit choppier and the wind had picked up, so for the return journey Chris tightly clutched Nora and Evan while Jo hung on to the side of the boat apprehensively for the 10 minute ride back to Bonhamn.

Höga Kusten

The High Coast is a stretch of Sweden’s Baltic coast. There are steep slopes and stark flat granite coastlines created by glacial activity 20,000 years ago. At that time the ice over this part of the world was almost two miles thick. All the weight pushed the ground down about half a mile. When the ice age finished and the ice melted about 10,000 years ago, the land rose about a third of a mile relative to the sea. It is still rising at an alarming quarter inch a year. In 1,500 years you will be able to walk from the Hoga Kusten to Finland on a land bridge over the Baltic Sea without wetting your feet. This amazing topographically and biologically active region of the world was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.

And it is stunningly beautiful.

The first morning after a very relaxed breakfast on the sunny deck we walked around the small bay on which the village of Bonhamn is built and went up the rocky hill to explore the coast on the other side. But not before stopping on the spit of rock sticking out at the far end of the bay where the kids found pools of freshwater and algae and tadpoles. For reasons that would take too long to explain, this spot became their go-to spot for everyday entertainment and play thereafter and was named Polliwog Ranch. Their activity of moving tadpoles from one pool to another became a social experiment and was named PRP, for Polliwog Relocation Project.

After hiking for about a mile during which the kids probably ran six miles back and forth and up and down and across granite rocks the size of houses we stopped for a quick snack of reindeer sausage,
knäckebröd, cheese, and elderberry flower juice on a nice warm mossy rock. Then we walked down to the water and the kids first and then the grown-ups got naked and jumped in the freezing Baltic Sea. We spent all day hiking and never saw another soul. Fun times in Sweden.

Oh - and if we thought it didn’t get dark in Stockholm, we were even further north here. Jo noted that the poor birds are up chirping twenty four hours a day.

Driving North

The next morning we left Uppsala behind and drove off in two cars to the high coast about five hours away. We took a detour from Highway E4 for a picnic lunch at Axmarbrygga by the Baltic sea and enjoyed it so much that it was decided that the two families would return to Sweden for a sailing trip together.

We stopped to buy groceries for the next few days at the industrial town on Sundsvall on the coast and the kids were put off by the factories and smoke stacks mixed in with the beautiful blue waters and the islands and inlets scattered around. After stocking up on groceries and wine (from the local System Bolaget) we got back on E4 and drove past many unpronounceable places and over an huge big suspension bridge that marked the entrance to the Höga kusten or high coast.

By the time we arrived at Bonhamn and unpacked into the two houses next to each other and strolled down to the water it was late in the evening but the kids had been cooped up for most of the day and they ran around on the rocks and the bouldery beach while we stared in amazement at the beauty of the place in the very slowly setting sun.

Another Day in Uppsala

The day after we arrived at Uppsala, Nora and Felix went off to school and we took a bus into downtown Uppsala (kids travel free). We hopped off near Stora Torget and walked a block over to Güntherska for a mid morning fika of delicious chocolate treats, baked goods and very dark roasted coffee. To order we pointed to things on the shelf which worked. But the items on the menu board were a complete mystery and I had to eat Evan and Vivian’s food and Jo’s sandwich stayed in it’s wrapper and we gave it to the middle eastern looking gentleman sitting outside the church door.

Then we walked down some old streets and bought tiny delicious strawberries (weren’t we too full?) from a stall and sat on wooden recliner benches by the river and ate them in the sun. Our next stop was the Linnaeus home / garden / museum but the kids and Jo balked at the idea of seeing 10,000 different species of plants and animals, and instead opted to take photos with the statue of Uppsala’s most famous citizen and move on.

The evening before Nina and I had argued if Andres Celsius should be considered Uppsala’s greatest scientific celebrity instead. After all, in most places in the world people say the word “Celsius” many times in their lives but they hardly ever say Linnaeus. Interestingly Andres and Carl were contemporaries - Andres was born in 1701 but died at a young 43, while Carl was seven years younger but lived into his seventies.

I firmly vote for Carl. At about the time Andres was dreaming up the Celsius scale (which he initially did up-side-down from the way it is today, with water boiling at zero degrees and freezing at 100 degrees) Fahrenheit was coming up with his scale, which though much more random than the Celsius scale, is still in use in some primitive societies today. On the other hand, no one had or has since categorized the world’s living things the way Linnaeus did. In the intervening two hundred and fifty years we have improved it and switched to using genes instead of relying on the phenotype, but the Linnaeus’ method makes sense even today. And the depth and width of his work is astounding. It’s what I learned in Mr. Cherian’s biology class in 1978 at HPS. 

From Linnaeus’ home we walked back towards the river, crossed a very picturesque bridge where most of Uppsala University’s students seemed to be hanging out and enjoying the beautiful sunny day, and walked up to the Domkryka - the cathedral. The outside was imposing with the dual spires, the inside was divine, and the crypts and statuary was interesting. Vivian was intrigued by a royal crypt where the king was buried with his three wives. The statue on top of the crypt shows him in bed with is two wives - there was apparently no room for the third.

Vivian found a shelf full of bibles from all over the world and wanted me to take a photo of one she thought was in Mandarin. Evan wandered into a room where there was a priest sitting in case someone needed one. We exchanged a few words in English and he in Swedish and we politely thanked him and left. Then Jo helped Evan light a candle for his friend in Austin who wasn’t well and for anyone else that needed a prayer and we wandered back outside blinking in the bright sunlight.

Our last stop before returning home was Pelle Svanslos’ park. Pelle No-Tail is a famous Swedish children’s character created by Gosta Knuttson as a subtle satire on Sweden’s socialist society. The Swedes have a very well developed and much admired children’s literature section, which includes Knuttson and Astrid Lundgrin - known worldwide as the author of Pippi Longstocking (Langstrump in Swedish). Vivian and Evan played. Jo and I sat and rested our feet. Then we walked across the park to the bus stop and took a bus back to Gnejsvagen, home, and a wonderful dinner of meatballs (yes, everyone does eat them all the time) outside on a picnic table with Chris and Nina while the kids played at the swings well past 10pm in the northern summer light.