See also: Ruben's blog

What a weird day. It started with Elias waking up somewhat early, immediately asking for water. I took him upstairs, gave him water and some breakfast, which he ate only half of.  He then curled up on the bench next to me and started to fall asleep.

Thinking this was odd, I brought him downstairs to sleep with Ruben while I hit the internet. He was sleeping behind Ruben, when I heard an odd cough, gag, and then he threw up all over everything. While I was cleaning everything up, Ruben took him upstairs to just be mellow. There he threw up again. It turns out it was just mucus that was stuck in his stomach.

We took a short hop to the Konsum (where Elias noticed there was a sun in the O of the name), and also stopped by the bakery to pick up some meatball sandwiches and the cake for the night’s desert. Elias ate a hearty lunch – so I wasn’t as worried about him feeling sick any more.

In the early afternoon, Ruben and I took Elias to Mariesburg. Elias played on the equipment for a while, then we went for a walk – he wasn’t interested in the beach there. We found a bird blind and I saw a heron (as well as other birds). On the way back we found the Gamelgarden. A docent lady who spoke very little English was still able to show us the smith’s house (with the bellows), the loom and spinning wheel. Elias was also so thirsty he begged for some water. She only had some wash water, so she gave him some apple juice. I was so grateful, I bought some of the tatting lace she had done as gifts.

Elias had been crabby most of this time, then he had pinched himself on the spinning wheel, so we took our leave. We headed back passed a wonderful park that Elias took no notice of, so we headed home in search of a band aid.

A short nap for Ruben and me later, we quickly got ready for our ride to show up. Just as specified (the Swedes are notoriously punctual), Ulf and Colleen were there right at 4:30. We loaded up the car with all of our stuff, the cake, wine, and the car seat, then headed to the summer house of Ulf and Ander’s parents, Leonard and Anne Marie. Their summer house is a small cabin (with two additional out-buildings for the grand kids) very close to the north end of Lake Väse.

Dinner was a traditional meal – starting with some pina colada sparkling cider, then two different types of Aquavit (snapps), 4 different kinds of herring, 6 different types of Wasa krisp bread, regular bread, 2 forms of smoked salmon (for dinner), potatoes (again), delicious fresh cheese, fruit, Swedish meatballs for Elias, more drinking, then cookies and the cake from Elias for desert.

Between dinner and desert we walked down to the beach to look around. Elias immediately asked to strip down to run around in the sand naked. It was a site to see!  We chatted, learned that Ulf is train engineer turned train salesman (and does a lot of traveling), he and Colleen are both divorced, they met through other train engineers (she’s Canadian and was dying to speak with other native English speakers. It turns out she’s moving to Sweden from London Canada to be with Ulf).

Ulf has two kids in the divorce. The kids and the wife live in the center of that tiny town, Ulf lives between that town and Karlstad in a farm house on some amount of land. We’ll get back to that in a moment.

Anne Marie understands English, but is not inclined to speak much of it. She’s like me with Spanish. She also used to run a day care when the kids were younger. Leonard used to work in the paper mills, but now buys old equipment from Germany, then refurbishes it and sells it. He’s “retired”… meaning he only works 3 days a week.

I can’t believe the way these people opened up their homes and their hearts to us. They watched Elias with glee, he could seem to do no wrong. (He was in a great mood by that point). I drank and ate way too much, as did we all.

We left around 9:30, and climbed into Ulf’s car. I wondered why we didn’t just get right back on the highway. Instead Ulf drove us to see a 1000 year old Rune stone. We continued on to his house, which again is this farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere. We hiked about 1/2 a mile into the woods and he showed us the burial grounds of chiefs that were from 300 B.C.E (B.C.)  Apparently they have been x-rayed twice, once in the 60s and once more recently. The graves have been plundered, but you can definitely tell that there was something there. You can see the rectangular shape of the graves, as well as the lids – the pieces of stones used to cover the graves. As I said, “This isn’t something you find in frommers.”

Once home we packed for our trip to Stockholm the next day.