Visitors from Scandinavia! (Part 1)

Our Swedish friends came to visit last month (and into this month, which was lovely as extended visits from friends are a treat that we haven’t been able to enjoy since 2019). It was wonderful to see them and we miss them now that they’re gone, but it has to be said that these visits were a lot simpler when the kids were small.

Small children are basically a form of luggage, though generally with more personality. You cart them from place to place and they pretty much stay wherever you are unless they go running off (this is where the Discworld fans nod sagely), and when that happens you go catch them because you are bigger than they are and can still outrun them. Also, the airlines are less likely to lose them.

But the bottom line is that with small children you only have to make one plan.

However, it turns out that our kids are grown now and while Oliver has moved back home for his job here in Our Little Town (at least for the next year or so) Lauren decided to stay up at Main Campus University and take classes there. On the down side, we don’t get to see her much. On the plus side, well, it does free up a bedroom for when we have guests, I suppose.

Mats and Sara have three kids – Maria, David, and Helena, all of whom are adults now. Helena has been in Wisconsin for the last year on a foreign exchange program – she didn’t want to stay with us, because what kind of adventure would it be to stay with people you’ve known since you were born? We got to see her a couple of times, though. Her year expired at the end of June, and the overarching purpose of her family’s trip here was to see her and meet her host family.

This was, of course, only the beginning.

Mats and David flew into Chicago on the 17th. David came up to Our Little Town on the bus while Mats flew to Minneapolis and northern Wisconsin to visit friends and his host family from when he was an exchange student in the early 1980s. Sara and Maria flew to NYC because Maria is an actor/director and wanted to see Broadway. A week later I drove to Oshkosh to pick up Mats after our friend Joe drove him down there for a baseball tournament. Sara and Maria flew to Chicago where Sara rented a car and drove to our house while Maria took the train to her host family in Indiana, where she was before the pandemic hit. She eventually came up to join us on the 27th. The whole family spent some days with Helena’s host family in the middle of their time with us – we never did see Helena this trip – and eventually the exchange program flew Helena home about a week ago, which is more or less when everyone else was scheduled to leave as well.

Meanwhile SAS pilots went on strike and it was not clear whether the rest of the family would get back to Sweden or just stay longer with us, which would have been fine (extra time with friends!), but after a few days of phone calls Mats, Sara, and David got rebooked onto a flight home via Finland while Maria (as planned) went back to Indiana to spend more time with her former host family because why not – it’s a long way from Indiana to Sweden, after all.

Got all that? There will be a quiz later.

So it was a lot more complicated than our previous visits have been, but no less lovely to see them. They’re the sort of people you can just hang out and talk and play games with (there were many iterations of Ticket to Ride, Hand & Foot, Codename, Avalon, and the Swedish card game Maja which is not all that far from Hearts, in none of which did I come in anything other than dead last), and they actually take me seriously when I say “make yourself at home – kitchen’s over there” which is something I adore about them.

Plus, they’re fun to do things with as well.

We did a lot of things.

David and I hung out together for much of the first week, since Oliver and Kim had to work. We did a fair amount of hiking around the trails here in Our Little Town – at least it felt like a fair amount of hiking to me, since my idea of hiking generally takes me on the path from my bedroom to my office. The trails have some adventurous parts which I left to the younger and fitter person in the group as seemed wise at the time, though I did manage to gouge myself on a tree branch at some point. This really only confirms the wisdom of leaving the adventurous parts to others as far as I can tell.

But it wasn’t just the two of us doing things. We all went to the Farmer’s Market here in town, for example, and one day we went out strawberry picking – nothing like a little agricultural labor to make a guest feel right at home!

There was a trip up to see Lauren and Maxim, which worked pretty well except that it was beastly hot, which kept the walking to a minimum.

We went over to Oliver’s workplace one evening when they were having a special event, where we met some friends unexpectedly (it is a small town after all) and where David and Oliver faced off over a giant set of Jenga blocks.

This is quite possibly the best photograph I have taken in years.  This could be a painting.

At some point we were absolutely shocked to discover that while David has been to the US many times he had never seen either Airplane! or The Princess Bride, which calls into question his right to stay on American soil (this applies to people who were born here too, by the way – if you haven’t seen those films you need to correct that immediately. Go ahead. I’ll wait) so we corrected this. It turned out that none of the rest of his family had seen The Princess Bride either, so WE WATCHED IT AGAIN, ALL TOGETHER. The sacrifices one makes for friends! Sacrifices!

I keep using that word. I do not think it means what I’m saying it means here.

I also convinced him to read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so now David is Fully Nerd Qualified and a Member of the Clan. Welcome aboard!

Eventually there were more Swedes in our house, and as this post has gotten long I will finish this story later.