Back to Sweden

Position: 58°39’58.3″N 13°51’51.0″E

It’s been quite a week. Quite a couple of weeks in fact. Fans of this blog will be happy to know we are back on the road and exploring exotic and out of the way places again. And it almost didn’t happen. Albuquerque’s mysterious energy vortexes held us tightly in their grip and only grudgingly let us go. More on that in a moment. But we are back in Sweden and have slept on Aleta for the first time in nine months. She still floats and the systems seem to function as they should. She only needs a mast and her sails remounted and we’ll be off sailing for points south.

Last year we barely touched Sweden, so this week we’re renting a car and making our way east towards Stockholm. We’re in no hurry. Stockholm is besieged by Swifties (including my daughter Emma), many of whom attended the Eurovision song contest in Malmö last weekend. Come Sunday, Tay Tay will perform her last gig and hotel prices will halve. But enough of the future, let’s talk about things we’ve actually done.

Roto-Rooter

I abandoned Carol to the hard work of preparing absolutely everything for our trip and went to Gaithersburg to facilitate a meeting for my clients at NIST. Back in Albuquerque, Carol ran her dad to the dermatologist (thanks to a last minute cancellation), arranged for a new roof for the house, prepped Bodhi for his summer home, and picked up Bob’s summer caregiver Anna. Then the toilet exploded, and Roto-rooter came calling twice in two days to fix it. Carol got about four hours sleep each night I was away. Arriving back on Thursday, I took care of a couple of last-minute honey-dos that took most of the evening. We woke at 6:00AM on Friday to pack in anticipation of our 10:30 flight to Amsterdam via Houston.

ABQ is a small airport and mercifully uncrowded. That means the ground staff are less harried and a bit friendlier. Checking our bags, our United representative congratulated us on our packing and clever distribution of weight. Between the spare parts for Aleta and Carol’s steamer trunk’s worth of clothes, I thought we’d done rather well. Up in the terminal breakfast beckoned as we waited for our plane. It was delayed. First by an hour, then another hour, and then another. United sent us more messages than a teenager addicted to Tiktok. With our four-hour layover becoming reduced to mere minutes, it was clear we needed another plan.

Frying the Fiendly Skies

Our itinerary took us to Amsterdam where we’d spend an expensive night in the Sheraton and go and explore the city for a day before catching a flight to Copenhagen. CPH is about an hour from where Aleta spent the winter. Realizing we wouldn’t make the connection, Carol cancelled the hotel ten minutes before we’d have to eat a couple of hundred dollars in no-show fees. I then called United to reschedule our original flight and negotiate a free-to-us hotel in Houston. They sent us options for three flea pits within a bus ride of the terminal. That left rescheduling the KLM flights from AMS to CPH.

In the old days airlines were service companies. They cared about their passengers and often did wonders to make sure you got where you wanted to go. These days they’re barely disguised extortionists ready to shake you down for money at any opportunity. KLM wanted $1,026 to change our tickets to one day later. Considering we’d paid $396 for the pair of them, I swallowed my rage and got creative.

Phoning United’s Premier desk back, I convinced the young woman at the other end to reroute us directly to Copenhagen the next day via Chicago. When she protested that Copenhagen was more than 350 miles from our original destination, I countered with, “I’m a million miler with United and I’ve been flying with you for over 30 years. I think you can do us a solid and make an exception.” And she did. It was the kind of old school service you don’t get from airlines today. Except if I’d been any type of regular traveller, we’d probably have been SOL in ABQ.

Downstairs we retrieved our bags, negotiated a free hotel for our extra night in Albuquerque and got $80 worth of food and drink. The next morning we flew to Copenhagen via Munich without problems.

Pollen

Still battling jetlag yesterday, we agreed that driving seven hours to Oslo was imprudent and likely impossible given we finally got on the road at 1:00PM. Instead, we opted for a small cabin on a quiet lake just outside Gothenburg. It was idyllic and regeneratively peaceful, so we were very surprised to learn from our hosts that we were three miles from Sweden’s second busiest airport.

Here, 1,200 nautical miles north of Albuquerque, about halfway up Saskatchewan, spring is just springing. The lilacs are only just popping out and bright yellow pollen blankets everything. It is a full month behind New Mexico. May’s annual high-pressure system has set up and the clear blue skies don’t fade until well past 10:00PM. Morning begins at about 4:00AM, although there’s a gentle glow all night. Here are a few photos taken from our porch last night.

Rötter

Today we set off in search of Carol’s maternal great grandfather’s birthplace. On March 25, 1860, Axel Walfrid Petrus Elfström came into the world in the town of Ullervad. About 20 years later he boarded a ship and sailed for America. At some point, Axel turned to God and became a man of the cloth. With his wife Mathilda, née Carlson (perhaps originally Karlsson), they pitched up in Centerville, Iowa, and established a Lutheran church. The rest is family history and the subject of a blog that Carol may write if enough people ask her to.

Walking through the graveyard at Ullervad’s church, we saw lots of Karlsson headstones, but no Elfströms. With no one in the church to ask, we couldn’t examine the church records for more information.

Journey

Ullervad is about eight kilometres from the local county seat, Mariestadt. Strategically located on Sweden’s (and the EU’s) largest lake, Värnen, the town has access to both Gothenburg and Stockholm via a network of canals. I can imagine Axel and Mathilda walking to the harbour at Mariestadt and excitedly boarding a barge for Gothenburg that would take them the first step of their journey to the United States.

Mariestadt’s old city centre is all somber, plain fronted buildings and cobbled streets leading down from the red stone 16^th century cathedral. It’s very quiet, but nothing is far from the shore and we could sense the onset of tourist season. The canal route and lake are popular with boaters moving across country for their summer holidays. Had we more time, we would have happily made the trip.

Here are a few photos of Ullervad and Mariestadt for your delight.

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