(Backup) My Swedish 3rd cousin

I’m sitting in the Amsterdam airport waiting to board for MSP.  Had a brief nap and woke up for a bit.  Yesterday was a great day!  For about a year and a half I have been messaging with Nicklaus Maldahm on Facebook. He found me through my mother’s obituary and is interested in researching the family. His mother and I are third cousins.  We arranged to meet at a boat landing dock where we boarded his small boat.  The cottage is on a small island In the Baltic Sea.

At the cottage we met his two children, Heldwig and August, his partner Thomas, his mother Brit Marie, father, brother, sister and more. We all enjoyed a swim before lunch.  The water was very comfortable and slightly salty.

Say what you will about Facebook and technology, but without them this party would have never happened. I’m hoping to have visits from some of these newly discovered relatives!

This is the pier where we parked the boat

We swam off a pier on the other side of the island while lunch was in the oven.

Lunch was really good.  Nicklaus made meat and vegetarian pies and salad for lunch.  His mother Brit-Marie had made some great cookies and pastries. We swam while the pies for lunch baked. 

This is the cottage.  

To swim we walked out the back of the cottage to the pier on the back side of the island.  The water was clear and deep.

There were about 10 of us in the water all treading water and chatting.  I loved the conversation. We all seemed to find the same things funny.  

We left about 3 in the afternoon to drive to Arlander airport where we had reserved rooms in a decommissioned plane which had been made into a hotel.  Before turning in we sat at a table on the wing and had a drink. The table was not level as the wing is not flat.

This is the hotel.  The room in the engine space is for rent, but if you have it, you need to exit your room, go down a ladder and up another to the main part of the plane to use a bathroom.   With our rooms we didn’t have bathrooms in our rooms, but there were plenty for our use.  Showers and all

At the Cottage with Nicklaus

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Finding Grandmas birth place

Our business today involved driving to Torshult in Smaland to find the small town where my grandmother was born.  On the way we saw a sign for a loppi which by now had learned meant yard sale.  We followed the sign down a short dirt road to a sale site.  It is a permanent sale!

This lovely lady was manning the store .  She spoke no English so she wrote down numbers when we wanted something.  

There was lots to see

I got these two plates and the table runner plus a bag of pretty generic buttons that had looked good through the plastic they were in.  Oh well, they will be a good souvenir.  Maybe they will end up on a Swedish themed quilt!

We drove on to Torshult. The family emigrated to the US because of bad crops, religious persecution and bad luck.  Farming here had to be near impossible.   So this is the edge of town.  

We had stopped to take some pictures from the road and this dog came out to greet us which was a really good thing because this girl came out after her and we got to visit with her.  She lives quite remotely yet spoke very good English.  She was really sweet and told us about her school and her family.  They have sheep, horses and one dog.

This is a typical house and these are typical rocks.  The soil must be quite shallow and there are rock piles everywhere

The Pasteur 

My grandma left here over 120 years ago and we have no idea where her home was.

Nature Day In Smaland

Smaland is very rocky and totally forested. It’s no wonder the emigrants had to leave for other places.  It great here for everything but farming. This day we dedicated to nature.  After a stop at a glass foundry we went to a nature preserve for a hike.  The ground was soft and good to walk on.  The trail was quite narrow and soft

The lingonberries are just starting to ripen

I ate about a pies worth of blueberries on the hike

Eric tested out the softness of the moss

This reminds me of a photo I took 20 years ago of Eric and Liza walking in a forest in Alabama

The map of where we hiked

This pile of harvested timber was alongside the road

Beautiful rock fences were everywhere.  No shortage of rocks!  I’m sure there is a new crop every year

When you drive on the local highways there is usually a crimp in the road as you enter a town. This slows the traffic.

In the late afternoon, we rented a canoe and took a ride on a small lake.  Fiona was a part time canoer and part time swimmer

At the bottom of our canoe ride there was a raft.

Here Fiona is moving along pushing herself along using the rocks on the bottom of the river

Time for our stay in the countryside

We took an Uber to the car rental and picked up our Skoda. Is is a really cool car and has features I want in my next car. One of them is that the wipers come on automatically and adjust to the right speed depending on the rate of rainfall.  The bad feature of this car is that the air conditioning did not work and it was hot.  Eric found a Skida dealer along our way, but they were closed. It was late Saturday morning. Also the car rental did not answer their phone.  So we had a breezy drive down to Alstermo, a very small town in Smaland.  Our new hosts are very present and friendly as apposition to our hosts in Stockholm’s who we never did meet.  We are now with Lena and Derik. They have many stories about their life and this place.  

A few photos of the new digs. First, the stairway leading to our apartment.  Not as bad as it looks

My bedroom 

Eric and Fiona’s room

Kitchen table 

The stove.  There was a choice here.  To cook you could light the wood in the stove or use the need cooktops sitting on the stove.  Had it been winter we may have chosen them wood fired stove

For dinner we went to a neighboring town to a restaurant off on a gravel road on what seemed to be a farm    Highly recommended, well known and traveled chef. This is the owner. We were the last customers of the day so after everyone else had left, he visited with us and gave us shots of schnapps flavored with cumin.  Delicious.  His stories would be a separate chapter in our upcoming book about Smaland.

This is my dinner. Wild boar steak over handmade pasta in a cognac cream sauce. Delicious!

Eric had moose steak with a red wine sauce

Fiona had a burger made with the meat of some kind of ram with big curled horns 

Eric’s beer was twice world champion dark lager and was great.  

Our appetizer was this plate of three dried meats.  The chef told us it takes 8 months to make it.  Top is venison, middle is wild boar and bottom is moose. All the meats are local.

Chandelier near our table. Driftwood and mossy stuff

Entrance to restaurant

From Museum to a lock out

We took a ferry over to another island to see sailing ships and happened upon the ABBA Museum.  We didn’t go in, but had some fun on the outside

This ship is a lighthouse ship that was in use in the past.  The lighthouse tender sat out in the sea and kept the light on.  Bad duty

For lunch today I had reindeer stew and God Lager.  Means good beer.  It was too.  Feel bad about eating one of Rudolph’s kin, but I gave up on Santa long ago

For supper tonight we got take out at a Thai restaurant and took it back to the garden of our building.  We sat out in the coolness and enjoyed our dinner.  When we were done eating and wanted to go back inside, we found that we were locked out.  Eric texted the owner while I watched through the door out to the street for someone to come in the other end of the building. Finally someone came and we got back into the building before anyone wet their pants.  It was about 9:30 pm. Before we realized we were locked out, we got some good pictures of Fiona