What a perfect day to be on a train; it rained and rained! And we slept and slept!
We had a wonderful Swedish-American breakfast this morning: cheese, all types of bread, strawberries picked from Tom's garden, yogurt, cereal along with Katie's and Carina's scrambled and fried eggs and bacon. Then it was off to catch the 11 a.m. train--the first of three to Borlange--only to find that the middle train, an X 2000--a very fast train with Internet connection and more--was all booked. With our Scan Rail pass, we are allowed to hop on and off any train without a reservations, except the X 2000, as we soon learned. So, we had to alter our plans and start our trip 2 hours later instead. This enabled us to have a walking tour of downtown Kalmar, where Katie and Tom hang out quite a bit. We had some coffee and chatted away until it was time to go back to the train station.
The train ride was spent reading, listening to iPods, watching movies on the laptop, and some major power napping. We changed trains three times; one time gave us only about 3 minutes between changes, but we made it. Finally, we arrived in Borlange about 8:00 and were greeted with big bear hugs from Michael. Michael is the son of Carin, who was the sister of my grandpa Folke. He and Lena have a lovely home in the village of Rommehed, where our Wallenberg family farm was until 1966. They live right by the water tower where a mini golf course is. Katie, Robby, and I took a little walk there and thought we might play tomorrow. A little after we arrived at Michael's house, we got a phone call from Scott with great news. Katie answered the phone, and he told her to hold my hand while he shared some news--"think PINK," he said. Sherry and Scott are expecting a new baby in January!!! What a surprise! Tears of joy immediately!
Shortly after, we played Kubb on Michael's infamous Kubb set from the island of Gotland. It, unlike most Kubb sets, is painted, and Michael and Robby are definitely the Kubb Kings. Kubb is an outdoor lawn game probably as old as the Viking times. Katie decided that our first game should be boys against the girls, and we started out by knocking the King down (instant end of game loss) three times in the first five minutes of play.
The boys were nice enough to forget they saw this, and we kept playing and won! Next, Robby and I played against Michael and Katie, and Katie proved to be the winning thread, but it really was a close, fun game. We spent the rest of the night visiting and remarking how amazing it was to be 1:00 in the morning and seem like it was only about 8:00 at night. You could really see the difference between how light it was here in the evening compared to in southern Sweden in Kalmar.
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