It’s winter break in Sweden and we’re on a family ski trip to Stöten – with the whole family for the first time ever!

After the first half day, everybody is pretty tired. We don’t do this very often, so our bodies need some time to get used to this again. Eric had a ski trip with work recently, but it’s been a year since Ingrid and I last did any skiing, and it’s the very first time Adrian stands on a pair of skis.

Both kids longed to play a board game, and we settled on Ticket to Ride, one of our favourite games. Even Adrian can now join in, with just a few adjustments.

It began well, but then as time passed, things started going downhill. Ingrid made a mistake (built the wrong route at one point) and then decided to get all huffy and sulky and took to throwing her cards when it was her turn. Adrian had increasing difficulties with sitting still and kept fidgeting and climbing around. My mother was constantly complaining about how worthless cards she kept getting. Eric and I made efforts to steer everyone back towards enjoying the game, then gave up on that and enjoyed ourselves only. Finally everybody else’s obvious non-enjoyment got to be too much for us as well, and we simply aborted the game and packed up.

Interestingly but not surprisingly, they complained about that as well. They all got some odd kind of pleasure out of their non-enjoyment of the game.

Adrian got a Skylanders game and a bunch of Skylanders figures for Christmas. These are now his new favourite thing.

Meanwhile, Eric has been working on designing and building a shelf for our entry hall (for a very particular purpose, so we can’t find an off-the-shelf one).

Now those things merged, and Eric ad Adrian are designing and building a shelf for all the Skylanders figures.

Today we had our traditional Christmas baking day: lussebullar and gingerbread cookies. The gingerbread dough would not co-operate but stuck to the table all the time, so Eric was kneading in more flour and rolling it out again and again. Which the kids found incredibly boring – but they also didn’t want to miss a single moment of making the cookies, so they stayed and waited.

Eric and Adrian playing the classical game “Guess who?”

Another day in Uppsala, getting my brother’s apartment in order. The cleaning is done, now we’re fixing miscellaneous stuff – putting up some shelving, oil treating furniture, etc. It feels good to be pretty much finished with this project.

Lunch was a hasty affair at the nearest burger place, to make the most of the hours we had.

The grand finale of this summer break: a two-day trip to Legoland. We arrived this afternoon and will spend most of the next two days in Legoland. Adrian spent almost all of this afternoon and evening at the window of our hotel room which overlooks the park, waiting for tomorrow’s visist.

A new attempt at camping today, with more success.

We camped at lake Årsjön in Tyresta, a nature reserve south of Stockholm.

The camping site was a 3 km hike from the parking lot at the end of the road. At first the path was wide and even, accessible even to wheelchairs and baby buggies, frankly rather boring. After a while we turned off onto a smaller path that was more akin to what I expect a forest path to be like: up and down, across stones and pine roots. The path was still very easy to follow with were red markers on the trees all along, so the kids could walk ahead when they wanted.

The forest was full of bilberries. Our hike followed the most popular and accessible paths right near the entrance to the nature reserve, where hundreds of people pass every day, so I would have expected the berries to be gone. But no, the bushes were full of berries wherever we looked. Plump, ripe, juicy, sweet, hanging right there at the edge of the path, they were just screaming at us – “Eat me!” We kept stopping because we just couldn’t pass them by.

When we got to the Årsjön camping site we pitched our tent and unpacked. Ingrid and I decided to sleep in the tent; Adrian and Eric chose to sleep in the lean-to. Ingrid carved in tree bark while Eric made a fire and I walked around taking photos. We grilled sausages and foil-wrapped meals I had prepared at home (potato, salmon, broccoli and bell peppers). For dessert we grilled bananas with melted chocolate, and mini marshmallows.

After dinner I wanted to walk some more so Ingrid and I went geocaching. We quickly got one cache very close to the camping site. Another one was close as the crow flies, but unfortunately on the other side of the lake. We stood on the rocky lakeshore and seriously considered just swimming across – it was at the narrowest part of the lake, literally 20 metres away from us. Had I been there alone I would have done it without a second thought. But with Ingrid, and unknown deep waters, and us all alone in the forest, I didn’t dare do it.

So we did it the hard way – hiked several kilometers around the entire lake. At first there was a path; then the path went off in the wrong direction so we just followed the GPS right through the bush. It wasn’t dense or rough or anything, just a bit uneven ground. Except then there was a bog in our way with no path through. We really, really did not want to go all the way around and were super happy when Ingrid spotted something that was almost a footbridge (two planks and a narrow tree trunk). We took off our shoes, turned up our trousers, and made our way across.

We got the cache in the end but the whole walk took us about three hours instead of the one and a half I had planned. Had it not been a clear night near midsummer, it would have been dark when we got back. We went straight to our sleeping bags. In retrospect, we should just have swum.

For our last day in Mercantour we drove to Col de la Cayolle, a high mountain pass, for a grand finale. Vast views, flowering meadows, turquoise lakes, you name it!

This pass was higher up than the area around Villeplane where we had been walking until now, so the landscape looked quite different and everyone walked with extra energy. There were no trees here, only grass and a few low shrubs, and bare rocks in many areas.

And marmots. When we saw the first one we were all excited and crowded each other to get a glimpse. By the time we had our fifth (or whatever) marmot encounter, it felt rather ordinary.

The notes for this walk said it would be 12 km which we judged to be definitely too much for the kids, especially since a few walks have turned out to be longer in reality than on paper. But for once the numbers seemed to be too high. When we had walked about a third of the way and looked at the time, we decided that we would be able to do all of it, especially since the 2nd half was generally gently downhill.

Which was all very good, except we had gotten a late start (letting Adrian sleep in so he’d be well rested for our long hike) so we got caught out by an afternoon thunderstorm on our way down. First some rain, then a pause, then some more rain, then thunder and a torrential downpour mixed with hailstones as large as the tip of my little finger. Luckily the actual thunder and lightning was clearly and definitely on the other side of the mountain so we didn’t have to worry about getting hit. But we had hail hitting us so hard that it actually hurt even through a rain coat; so much rain and hail that we were wading through deep icy puddles towards the end. And that continued for roughly an hour I believe.

That whole last section is a blur in my memories; I remember green views and paths that resembled piles of kids’ building blocks, which I would really have enjoyed otherwise. But mostly I just remember all of us running to get back to the car as fast as possible; in the end I was running while carrying Adrian to protect him from the hail. Fortunately the path was stable and not slippery so nobody fell, but we all got very wet. Yet another one of those experiences that was pretty miserable while we experienced it, but that we can afterwards remember as a bit of an adventure.

A thunderstorm is approaching