I guess it was bound to happen. Since I’m a Swede, there was always going to be one post about IKEA on this blog. The stars were aligned, and now they deliver. About 3 years ago, Haparanda (33km from my home town) was a depressed, run-down border town with very few incentives to entice a [...]
My Mom is here for two weeks, staying with us in the Engstrom family home. That could be a very scary thing, considering neither of the parents speak the same language. In-laws together, who can’t understand one another for two weeks? Possible recipe for disaster. Thankfully, they love one another – as you can [...]
Last time it was the “How to slaughter a moose” video. This visit it’s foxes strung up on a house. Northern Sweden is light years away from where I grew up. How did the girl from sunny southern California end up with a boy from northern Sweden? Fate really does have a fantastic sense [...]
I’ve had to wait a year to give my mom a hug – but the wait is over! I finally got that hug today. My Mom flew in today to spend two weeks in the winter wonderland with us. A year is the longest I’ve gone without seeing my mom – too long, if [...]
As I wrote recently, spring in northern Sweden is a dramatic event. In this I have been proven right: the day we arrived happened to be the last day of winter. Since then, the thermometer has been firmly in the red, with sultry temperatures making the snow melt at breakneck speed. In a perfect [...]
Today, my wife decided to re-live our oh-so-recent days of traveling in India. How? Why she decided to make a snow sculpture of the Taj Mahal in our front yard. I was employed as a snow-shoveller, complementing my wife’s artistic bent with my ferocious muscle (cough cough cough). Initially, I feared that we were [...]
Northern Swedes and Americans celebrate Easter in very different ways. They celebrate for an entire week. We generally gather on Sunday. They dress as witches. We dress (unfortunate) men as rabbits. They decorate eggs, then eat them. We decorate eggs, hide them then set children loose to find them. Either way you look at [...]
Palates are refined in youth. If you grew up eating or drinking something, chances are you’ll tie it to your childhood and not see it for what it really is. I’ll use the Swedish Easter drink, Paskmust, as an example. I find it repulsive. It smells like alcohol but it’s a children’s drink. It contains [...]
There comes a time in a woman’s life when she looks at herself in the mirror and says, “Bleh!” (Basically the opposite of what is pictured above) For me, that day was yesterday. We’ve been on the road for eleven months now and the personal beauty department has been closed for business. Au natural [...]
Easter is the time of year when witches mount brooms to fly to Blåkulla: an offshore island where they cavort with the Devil for the better part of a week. To make things worse, the witches have a spell that makes them look like they‘re still at home. All this is according to ancient Swedish [...]
If you were with us when we were in Sweden eight months ago, you read about me weaving carpets. We’re back and I’d like to say that I’ve moved onto other things, but, well, no – the draw of all those potential carpets was too strong. So I sat all day in front [...]
We’re back at my parents place in Northern Sweden – a nice little town just south of the arctic circle. In some ways, this is an extreme place. Last time we visited, it was midsummer – the time of the year when the sun hardly ever sets. The counterpoint to that time is midwinter – [...]
This is me on a Swedish Spark. The word translates to “kick”. It is a little thing that we use to transport ourselves up here in the north of Sweden. It may look weird and archaic (it is), but it is really quite a convenient way of getting around. Speed wise it ranks up there [...]
Our backpacks began as mixed bags of color and white clothes. As time passed, we fazed out the light colors in favor of the dark clothes. This video shows why… We were (are?) seriously dirty. We’ve had our clothes laundered, but more often than not it’s been washed in a local river or using [...]
We’re still on our Annapurna trek in Nepal, which is a little too off the beaten track to access the internet. While we’re busy trekking and are off-line, we’ve put together some of our past favorite posts/locations to keep you busy. Enjoy! Sweden: As Martin describes in our About Us page, he grew up in [...]
You know the saying, “to fly by the seat of your pants?” Well, that's been our philosophy for most of our adult lives – before and after meeting, falling in love and marrying. We're now taking that idea on an extended round-the-world trip. Follow us as we share the good, the bad and the downright nasty of life on the road.
