On board M/S Victoria I, on our way to Estonia.

For the kids, one major highlight of this annual trip is the buffet dinner on board the ferry. This time we shared the buffet at least two busloads of tourists from some Asian country who had different expectations about personal space than we did. Adrian got butts shoved up into his face several times, until we adjusted our tactics for the buffet queue.
Ingrid’s choices from the buffet: taco shells and nachos with chopped tomatoes; ketchup; prawns.
Adrian’s choices from the buffet: french fries, mini sausages, cucumber.

After dinner: boredom.

After boredom: a night of very broken sleep for all three of us.

Peak season for Swedish strawberries, so we eat lots of them every day: on porridge, with cereal and milk or yoghurt, or just as they are.

Ingrid and I decorated gift boxes, for gifts for our friends in Estonia. We’re leaving in just two days! Lots of packing tomorrow.

For those of you not familiar with Stockholm, Gröna Lund is Stockholm’s amusement park. We try to fit in a visit to “Grönan” each summer.

I love roller coasters best, and chain carousels are also great. Anything that makes me feel like I am flying, basically.

I’m looking forward to when Eric and I will be able to go on some rides together. Ingrid is old enough to go off on her own, but not enough to take care of Adrian for as long as it would take us to queue and take a ride as well. The queues weren’t too bad in the morning, but after lunch the waiting time for all the best rides was around 30-40 minutes.

Ingrid loved every moment of the day and went on almost every ride she could. (A bunch of them have a 140 cm height limit and she’s quite a bit short of that still.) Roller coasters, things that spin, the scary stuff, things that spin and go up and down at the same time – anything! She’s not afraid of any of the rides so we could do a lot of them together.

Adrian almost broke down crying when he realized where we were going. He’s not fond of any of the fast rides, which means most of them. But after calming down he remembered that the flying elefants were fun, and the mini Ferris wheel, and the wacky house (a vintage attraction from the 1920s!) and above all the “Love tunnel”. He did the Love tunnel at least three times. In the end even he was quite happy with the day.

It was a miserable 13°C outside today and drizzling on and off. Which is perfectly fine for April but definitely below expectations for July, even in Sweden. Nevertheless the kids needed activity so we went to a playground. Note that despite the weather, they decided that bare feet was just the thing for climbing.

Ingrid and Adrian on their own are mostly bored by playgrounds now, but my nephew-in-law (is that a term?), i.e. one of the cousins, stayed overnight, so they had extra company. Lots of activities are more fun when you have company.

Not that there wasn’t boredom, too…

But they held out longer than I had expected – in part because neither Ingrid nor cousin I wanted to be the first one to admit that they wanted to go home.

Rain yesterday, rain today and rain tomorrow.

Luckily we had guests today (Eric’s sister with her family) so we didn’t go all stir crazy. Some of us even enjoyed the rain: Ingrid and one of her cousins went out and poured water on themselves in our inflatable pool and got all soaked. After dinner they went to the paddling pool at the neighbourhood playground. Playing in a pool when it is 15°C outside would normally not be anybody’s idea of fun but the pouring rain made it exciting.

We went to IKEA the day before yesterday to buy a wardrobe for our bedroom. No success then, because while there was a lot to choose from, there was nothing that was exactly right. After two days of mulling it over (and looking at competing alternatives, all of which were even further from what we wanted) we now decided which of our requirements we would let go of, and made up our minds. So today it was back to IKEA again to actually buy a wardrobe.

Wise from our experience from Monday, we asked the kids to pack some entertainment. Adrian packed a box of Legos; Ingrid packed a stack of Kalle Anka comics. At this point he was getting restless though, and when he saw me moving around and taking photos, he saw an opportunity to run around and make silly faces at the camera.

Ingrid and I cycled to Ursvik. As on previous occasions, geocaching took us to cool, interesting and nice places that we would otherwise never have visited. For example, en route from our 3rd cache to the 4th one along the old military railway embankment, we found the best strawberry place ever: endless amounts of plump, juicy berries! We left because we were stuffed, well before we ran out of strawberries!

And at the end of the embankment we found what I believe to be an old train platform right next to the tunnel entrance for what is probably an underground storage bunker. Too bad I didn’t think of taking any photos of that place – I was too busy searching for the cache. It required a bit of rock climbing and was the trickiest one we’ve found thus far in terms of terrain.

Ingrid’s view:

It rained today. We went to IKEA to look for wardrobes for our bedroom. By the time we got home again, the rain had stopped, and it looked like all the slugs and snails in the garden had come out to enjoy the moisture. They were everywhere. Ingrid and I went out slug picking. We kept count: she because I pay her per picked slug, and I because I was curious. Our combined total was a mind-boggling 281 slugs.

I don’t want to honour those marauding bastards with any photos so here is a shot of its less annoying cousin, the grove snail (parksnäcka, Cepaea nemoralis). Although some people on the internet say that these snails also eat live plants and not just dead plant material, so who knows, maybe I should be picking these as well. They are also very numerous.

Because of the slugs and snails, we are not getting a single carrot or broccoli this year and probably no peas either. The carrot and broccoli seedlings grew to a few centimetres’ height and then vanished overnight, one by one. At that stage they were far too small for deer to bother eating them so it’s got to be the work of the molluscs. If I had lots of time, I’d protect the seedlings, but I don’t. Maybe another year. This year I guess I’ll just enjoy my tomatoes.

Cycled to the supermarket. We need surprisingly large amounts of food and all kinds of essentials (like milk and juice and eggs and potatoes) keep running out, now that all four of us are at home and thus take all our meals at home.