Amelia's Blog: December 28: Visiting with Eva and Putte, driving to Gotland

In the morning, we visited with Eva and Putte, Johan's parents. They are two of the loveliest people I know, and I'm really grateful that we got to see them. They are full of interesting stories, and I collected a few of them for the zine about Sweden.

After the visit, we went to Linkoping for Per to skate in their indoor park. It was in the same building as some community spaces. While we were there, there was a religious gathering in the space below the cafe. While there was the sound of skateboards coming in from one door, beautiful chanting was raising up from the floor. It was a little surreal.

When we left on this road trip, we hadn't really decided where to go yet. We thought about Norway, but the train was all booked. There were no flights up north to Kiruna that made sense. So we had just rented a car with a return date of January 1st, and figured we'd sort it out as we went. We did! We decided to go to Gotland. It's a big island three hours off the coast of Eastern Sweden. The ferries run late at night, so we had until 7pm to get there. We didn't quite do our calculations right, and it took a little longer than we'd thought to get dinner in Linkoping (but it was REALLY TASTY), and Per had to drive like a bat out of hell though unlit country roads to get us to our ferry on time. We couldn't figure out how to get the audio to work with my phone, so while we were driving I read from the only short stories book I had on my kindle, a collection by Frank L Baum for children. Every story ended with a moral. They were weird stories, and paired well with hurtling through the night with a do-or-die trajectory.

We made it to the ferry in time! Our airbnb for the next two nights was a tiny house inside of Visby's city wall. It was on the upper part of town, and overlooked multiple church ruins and the winding streets below. We were worn out, but the view was beautiful and we slept well.

The apartment in Vadstena