Eric’s niece just graduated from high school and had a party today to celebrate.

We played “Settlers of Catan”. Eric won with a mile-wide margin. Adrian followed his favourite strategy, which is to bet on development cards all the way.

Finally a warm and sunny day, when it’s a pleasure to be outside. I spring cleaned the flower beds, removing last year’s dead plants to make room for this year’s growth. Eric swapped tires on the new car.

Eric was away travelling for work on his actual birthday, so we had a small celebration today. He cares as much about birthdays as I do, which is very little indeed. But we did have cake of sorts, and flowers and a candle.

Our cottage here is small but quite lovely. There is a sofa large enough to comfortably fit all of us, and a wide window with afternoon sun.

Ingrid and Adrian love the TV. (We don’t have one at home.) They found Nickelodeon and haven’t switched away from it yet. Nickelodeon is showing the exact same shows as last year, and even the year before – The Thundermans and Henry Danger. I even recognize individual episodes from last year’s stay at Idre.

Adrian got a spring haircut. Eric got a regular haircut.

Eric wants to make sloe cordial, and possibly also sloe gin and/or sloe wine, so we went picking. (The sloes are there and there’s plenty of them this year, so they are simply crying out to be used for something.)

Adrian gathered sticks, dragged them around, and used them to crush sloes. And shot sloes at me with his slingshot.

I learned that sloe bushes come in several varieties – I noticed at least two distinct ones. One had larger, more oblong berries, and larger, greener leaves. The other had more thorns; smaller, flatter berries, more like blueberries in shape; and its leaves were smaller and had already turned red.

Fresh bread.

I’m a food snob, and bread is one of the foods I am snobbiest about. Most Swedish supermarket bread is barely worth eating – flavourless and with the mouth feel of a dry, loose sponge. Many upmarket “artisanal” breads are no better – expensive and with lots of very crusty crust and lots of big sourdoughy holes, but still without much flavour.

Eric’s breads on the other hand are so good that I can eat them every day and still not tire. Most of them I eat with only butter. There is no need for cheese or anything like that.

The bread in the photo, a scalded rye loaf with sunflower seeds and caraway seeds, is my absolute favourite. There are others that have more yummy things in them, but this one has the perfect balance between everything.

For our last day here, we took a trip to the Hintertux glacier.

From Hintertux village, a chain of gondolas can take you all the way up to the top, above the clouds. There is enough snow there for year-round skiing. It felt pretty bizarre to arrive in sandals and t-shirt (although we quickly added fleeces and jackets) and meet skiers and snowboarders.

We had no plans to do any skiing, but there were some snowy attractions for kids. They had fun sledding on inflated rubber tubes, but the snow kept getting into Adrian’s sandals.

Gondolas took us partway down, and all of a sudden we were back in summer. Then we walked the last bit down, from Sommerbergalm to Hintertux village.

This was a very picturesque walk, like most of them here – steep rocky mountains, winding paths with wide views, meadows dotted with fir and pine, lovely little brooks and waterfalls.


We do have mountains in Sweden and there are plenty of hiking paths among them, so one might wonder what the point is of travelling so far to hike in yet more mountains. But the Swedish mountains are very different from the Alps. The Scandes are old and worn-down. While they can look quite mountainous from afar, when you get closer, they usually aren’t that impressive. Whereas here in the Alps, it’s all steep, bare rocky walls and narrow valleys. The Alps are also much lusher.