Almost there

Remember when the kids were little and you had to travel somewhere quite far by car with them and three minutes into the trip they started up with "Are we almost there?" Well, I feel the same right now. It has been a lot of driving and my knee and one foot are killing me.

On the bright side is that George Clooney has gotten married and I am happy for him. But, I am sorry girls, he is now officially out of the loop and this piece of news I understood in German from the car radio. I also think that I understood that the Lufthansa pilots in Frankfurt are going on strike tomorrow but maybe you have better check that somewhere else. It could have been something completely different. It is fun, though to have the radio on in a different language.

This will just be a short little entry with photos of my trip from Sweden to Grenoble so far since I am supposed to have an early night and get going bright and early tomorrow to reach my destination early afternoon.

Taken on the sight seeing trip with
Mary. The bridge to Sweden seen
from a different angle. I am usually
on it so I don't have any previous
photos of it.

This building is called Turning Torso
and I saw it in Malmö when my friend
Mary took me on a sight-seeing trip
before catching the ferry the next day
over to Rostock.

Family of Guinea pigs at the hotel that I stayed in in Rostock.
The couple who run it are both keen travelers and in the hotel,
which is an up-market backpackers you can find everything
you can possibly need. Breakfast was a delight with a nice
spicy Thai soup and other delicacies.

Beautiful boardwalk in Warnemünde, twenty minutes from
Rostock. Wish I could have stayed longer.

It is bed time and I don't think I will have any problems falling asleep, counting cars. Good Night or rather Bon Nuit since I am in Switzerland now!

PS I don't want to hurt my German readers feelings but I am sorry to say that the German food still hasn't improved or is it that the food you get around the Autobahn is particularly bad. Yes, it must be that. Maybe they have not had all the cooking programs that we have in Sweden these days. That is going overboard the other way almost. Every TV channel has at least one or two cooking and baking programs in the evening. You wonder a bit about what has happened. I will probably get back on that subject again but now it is definitely goodnight.

Power napping

... or cat napping or nana napping or whatever you call it, is wonderful. Especially now that I am retired. It used to be that we made fun of hubby and his power napping. We could be driving back to the house from somewhere and suddenly, only ten minutes from the house, he just had to stop and sleep for five minutes while me and the kids had to sit quietly and just contemplate the landscape. Then he would wake up and we would be home five minutes later.

Now than I am retired I realize how nice it is to have a quick nap whenever you feel a bit sleepy and when you wake up you feel so much better.  I know I am going to have to have a lot of them soon on my drive down to Grenoble from Sweden. I usually need one even when driving into Gothenburg from the cottage and that is only an hour's drive.

So today is the day before leaving the cottage and I am trying to get things done, laundry, defrosting of fridge, last-minute gardening etc but I am very good at procrastenating so here I am, dear friends, writing to you instead and Skyping with hubby.

I am planning to go a different way down to Grenoble this time so I am taking the ferry to Rostock and spending a day there looking around and then on to who knows where? It will be another blog entry later on.

One thing I have noticed driving around in Gothenburg is that they have quite a few of these nice plantations that the tenants take care of together. You can grow flowers and veggies etc and I guess they must have some sort of system of taking care of it. Yesterday they were making apple juice for example, all together. It looked like fun.

So my mother has turned ninety and apart from bad hearing and bad vision and lack of memory, she is in pretty good shape. I hope I will  be as healthy as that  if I reach that age.

Here is my mother with one of her
uncles

And here she is  with her brother at
the age of sixteen I think

So leaving Sweden and the rapidly approaching fall to return to Australia and spring. It is very weird and confusing! So long!

Back in the saddle

They say you should always get back in the saddle after falling off a horse, or in this case a lawn mower, and I did, both, fell off and got back in the saddle. So now I have mowed the whole 3000 m² and guess what hubby said when I spoke with him on Skype and showed him? " Why haven't you raked and picked up the grass"? How he managed to spot that all the way from Australia I'll never know!!

Taken from Trädgårdsföreningen, another little gem in
 Gothenburg that I strongly recommend that you visit.

I went in to Gothenburg yesterday to pick up my mother since the weather has been absolutely gorgeous the last few days, but Sod's law, yesterday afternoon it started to rain and has rained all night.

Our trusty deckbuilder is back though, since it is not raining at the moment and he says he wants to get as much done as he can because it is supposed to rain this week. He is a hard worker but he has a little quirky habit, he speaks to himself. Quite loud! As loud as you would if you were speaking to someone else. So I don't know how many times I have gotten up to answer him but realized half way that he was not talking to me.

Next Sunday is the election here in Sweden and it is all your hear or see at the moment. You can also vote in advance which a lot of people seem to do. My biggest problem is that the different parties all sound reasonable when you hear them talk, one after another (with some major exceptions) so how  on earth are you to make a choice? Also I am very susceptible to how they look and present themselves. I know it is shallow but I guess that is me.

Otherwise not much happening here at the moment. It is clearly going towards autumn and the colors are changing.  The forest is full of mushrooms but I am not very knowledgeable when it comes to that. In fact, yesterday, the neighbours came in with a whole basket to give us but I only took two big ones and now I don't know what to do with them. Do I put my life in my neighbours' hands and eat these darned things and maybe perish due to human error or do I sneak them into the rubbish bin?

Don't worry, I know that you are
 not supposed to eat these, ever!
 It is just that we have so many of
them around here.

Bye for now and thanks for stopping by!