We were on the move by bus today after a fascinating tour of the Stockholm City Hall. This is where the Nobel Prizes are awarded. We saw the hall where the dinner is held and the Gold Hall where the dancing happens afterwards. The entire interior is very impressive.

The bus took us through the southern part of Sweden. There wasn’t much to see from the highway, but there was some pretty agricultural land. We did a lunch stop in a small town with a historic canal and typical Swedish wooden houses. This was the location of today’s curious siting. 🙂 We also had a brief rest stop for fica.

We arrived in Kalmar in the evening, checked into a quaint hotel and then did a orientation walk around the small city. It’s on the Baltic Sea and the old part of the city is very charming. It has an unusual Baroque church on the central square – it was closed so we couldn’t see the inside.

We chatted with our tour guide, Nina, at the end of this walk and found out we are mutual fans of the TV series “Borgen”. That segued into a discussion about Danish politics and then how the Nordic countries handled the pandemic. Very interesting conversation! We ended up having dinner with her and another couple from the tour. We went to a very cool underground restaurant. The ambiance was amazing and the food was delicious!

Today’s curious siting x2:

Being able to start the day with a Scandinavian breakfast was worth getting up early. Our bodies haven’t quite calibrated yet. A nice walk outside before the rain came in helped adjust our circadian rhythm. We had a lovely fika (coffee break) at a cafe – the best latte I’ve had in ages and a kanelbulle (cinnamon roll extraordinaire).

With my tote bag shopping mission accomplished, we headed to the Royal Palace to see the changing of the guard. It was quite a show! I’ll have to upload our videos somewhere for access soon.

The rain started as we were eating a late lunch and it lasted the rest of the day. We met our tour group at 4:00 and got acquainted. I guess it’s not surprising that everyone but us is retired (or maybe just doesn’t work?). Our tour guide took us around the area of our hotel and then we took a bus to a restaurant off the beaten path where we had an authentic Swedish meal. It consisted of pickled herring, cheese, Swedish meatballs, potatoes and lingonberries. It was delicious!

We had a really nice chat with a couple from Rhode Island (close to our age, retired early). The walk back was really wet, but atmospheric with cobbled roads and nice views of the city. We took the metro for the last leg of the trip to the hotel. The tour guide – Nina- is awesome and she will be with us for the entire trip. A local guide will do the tour tomorrow.

Today’s curious siting: a teeming koi pond and creepy sculpture in a little tucked-in park.

It’s a beautiful day in Stockholm, Sweden! We had a hassle free trip and I even slept a bit here and there. The two-hour layover in Iceland at 1:30am EDT kinda disrupted the sleep schedule.

We made the mistake of eating “Mexican” food at the airport forgetting how substandard it is in Europe! We will try hard to seek out good local food from here on. 🙂

We opted to take the train to city center then walk to our hotel. It was a long walk, but it gave us a sense of the city. It feels so good to be back in Europe again! We’ve missed it so much!

During our walk to the hotel, I remembered that Dick and I are not always in harmony when we travel. We don’t quite have the same strategies or preferences and that can cause friction. The stress of traveling now just adds another layer. We always realign and I can’t think of a trip where the friction points outweighed the shared enthusiasm of what were experiencing. So whatever jet-lagged short tempered incidents flared up today have been resolved!

After a quick wash up and change, we headed out to do a little shopping. I planned to buy a new Fjallraven tote bag for this trip and then use it for a work bag. But guess what? The stores close at 5pm on Saturday. Apparently the Swedes like to enjoy their Saturday evenings rather than toil away at retail. 😏

We opted to walk along the water in the old city and caught what will likely be the last of the sun for this part of our trip.

Our belated anniversary dinner was at a restaurant with floating pavilions. I had marinated mussels — Moules! — and they were delicious! Dick went for the iconic Swedish Meatballs.

The jet lag set in after dinner and we both zonked out around 9pm.

Curious siting of the day: many weddings! We were often in city centers on Saturday’s and would see a bridal couple exiting city hall where their civil ceremony took place. But we saw as many as ten bridal parties around Stockholm city hall this evening!

Like a lot of people, we had hoped to travel in 2020. And by the looks of an international airport terminal, many of us are ready to finally make it happen. I don’t think I need to explain the different stress level that traveling rises to in 2022. We have escaped COVID so far and are very concerned that it could upend our best laid plans.

We are about to embark on a 14 day tour of Scandinavia ala Rick Steves. After a hop over through Reykjavik, we’ll land at our first destination — Stockholm. We are so excited!

It’s been a crazy week as I began an unusual transition to a new job (more on that later). I basically had four days of onboarding and initiation then one day of a professional conference. After almost three weeks of vacation, I’ll jump into the new gig. Anyway, this all involved lots of in-person meetings, meals and large groups of people at the conference. Quite nerve wracking to be vigilant about masking and air quality! We have to test negative on Sunday before we start the tour. I’ve already had a nightmare that I tested positive 😱

I’m so happy to be resurrecting this blog and sharing our travels again! Enjoy!

C

I met Elly Smid nine years ago and though she had every reason to be cautious and skeptical about me, she graciously welcomed me into her home. I don’t know what she said about me when I wasn’t around (and I don’t care), but in her presence I felt accepted and eventually loved. Dick and I had some ups and downs while we were dating, but she never alienated me – in fact, it was just the opposite. She was always encouraging and I felt like she was rooting for me.

She was fussy, stubborn, sometimes manipulative and definitely old school, but in a sweet and endearing way that made me just roll my eyes 🙄 and shake my head. I don’t remember ever being angry with her. When Dick and I announced that we were getting married, she was so happy — there was no analysis or scripture lesson. She knew that I loved the Lord and I loved Dick and Kathryn. That’s all that mattered. I will never forget her joyous embrace on our wedding day (it helps that it was captured in this photograph).

I had never known what to call her and basically avoided calling her anything. 😬 After I was the wife of her son, she asked me what I would call her. I said, “I think I will call you mama and Han will be papa”. She thought that was perfect. 👍

We had many kitchen table talks and we talked about many topics, mostly Dick and Kathryn stuff. I’ll miss gathering around that kitchen table for breakfast, saying hui morgen and being waited on like I was in a diner (cup of tea? croissant? juice? don’t get up).

I will forever cherish the wonderful times we spent together in Nederland where she was in her element. If a person was Dutch, they were immediate kin — she would talk to them as if she’d known them for years. I felt bad that I sometimes put her in a bind between Dutch and English and it would get her all confused about which language to use! She had to have a broodje haring, shop at Hema, stock up on Dutch goodies at Albert Heijn and a pannenkoeken dinner was strongly suggested.

This post is in the past-tense because Mama passed on to her eternal rest this week. Last Friday, she said my name for the last time. It was just my name, but I heard “I’m so glad you’re here” and again felt her love and acceptance. I can’t yet imagine life without her in it.

“Rejoice and be glad for great is your reward in heaven.”

Have you shopped for furniture lately? The furniture market is a crazy overload of products. There are a bazillion online stores and many of them offer you “affordable” furniture shipped quickly to your door. You just need to take a wild guess at the quality, color and proportions. You can browse through reviews of the suckers who took the bait to evaluate whether their opinion matters. The “affordable” online merchants are rabid and once you enter their website you will be inundated with email offers and internet ads on social media.

I’ve spent countless hours perusing online furniture sites. I spend way too much time trying to find the perfect piece and even more time evaluating whether what I see is what I’ll actually get. So far, I’ve ordered a sofa table (two shelves and four legs that will be mostly hidden behind a sofa — low risk) and an area rug. The table was fine for the price and easy to put together. The rug hasn’t been shipped yet; it’s apparently coming directly from Turkey?

I’m also pursuing second hand online shopping. I really want to save money, help people get rid of unwanted stuff and keep perfectly useful items from ending up in the land fill. Easier said than done. Again, I spend inordinate amounts of time finding what I need and like. Then one has to navigate the idiosyncrasies of the people who post. I’ve encountered a couple of categories. There’s the people who just don’t respond. The item is still listed for sale, but crickets in response to my interest. Then there’s the people who don’t post a description or post an inaccurate description. I’ve found that a lot of people think their lousy photos tell everything. Do they not realize that low res photos show no detail and that colors vary wildly from one monitor to the other? 🙄 We wasted time going out of our way to look at a sideboard that looked great in the low res photo. The item was nicked, scratched and the top veneer was coming off. There are some really good sellers out there, though. We’ve purchased a dresser and counter stools at a great price from some really nice people.

One might think that going to a reputable furniture store would be the safest route to acquiring good furniture. Not so fast. We spent over five hours furniture shopping this past weekend. We started at a store where we bought our coffee table. I saw a couple of pieces on their website that looked promising. So yeah, those pieces were not in the store. We did find a piece that we liked. It was lower on our shopping priority list, but it was on sale and we decided to get it. We picked it up from the warehouse to save on delivery costs, which also meant that it came in a box and had to be assembled. We went to Gardner, MA, the self proclaimed furniture capital of Massachusetts. It was a bust. The Gardner Furniture Outlet also did not have the pieces we saw online and their selection was pretty small. We went to another store which has gorgeous furniture, but even the outlet prices were three times what we could afford. They build the furniture there and will do custom work . . . for a premium. 🤑

One of the most stressful aspects of furniture shopping for me is having to send every choice up for review to the husband, asking “do you like this?” over and over. 🤦🏻‍♀️ Our tastes are not that dissimilar, thank God, but since I’ve already deliberated over the selection as described above I’d rather skip this final approval step!

I have faith that we will eventually fully furnish our new home. I’d like to to be done NOW, but I’ll summon up the patience and perseverance to wait until we find what we like, can afford and will live with for a long time. In the meantime, we have some furnishings to get rid of!

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens” Ecclesiastes‬ ‭3:1‬ ‭

I’ve been thinking a lot about timing lately. I believe things happen at a particular time for a reason. It’s not all random. As much as we try to control time and therefore timing, it is just beyond our full control. Instead of waxing philosophical and over analyzing it all, I choose to be grateful. Thank you God for your orchestration over the events of my life — the good, the sad, the difficult. By your grace, the timing is perfect.

After eight months of searching for my next job, I had a flurry of interviews for two job possibilities. The first interviews for each were a week apart, but the second rounds were two weeks apart. As I feared, an offer came from the least desirable job first and I had to hold them off for a full week before I knew where I stood with the job that I most wanted. The timing wasn’t ideal, but it worked out in the end and I had enough information to make the best decision for my future when I needed to make it. The timing of interviews allowed me to spend time with my family in Florida in January and to help out with Emma for a few days in February. The start date for my new job allowed me to be with my husband’s family when his father passed away and attend my grandmother’s funeral.

As soon as I accepted a job offer, we started looking for a house to buy. There wasn’t much to choose from in the area where we were looking and it felt like we were going to open houses merely to rule them out. We were prepared to have to extend our apartment lease beyond the end of May. On my birthday, March 17th, we attended five open houses thinking we didn’t have a strong interest in any of them. But there was a condo that grabbed our attention and after I resigned to the fact that it was in a subdivision in a town that was last on my list, we decided to take a second look with our realtor. It checked off most of the boxes on our wish list, has beautiful features and it felt like a place we could call home. We put in an offer that night and it was accepted right away. We were able to do the initial paperwork and inspection in the week between Papa Smid’s passing and the funeral. This was also my first week of work, but Dick picked up the slack. We will close on house and move before our lease expires and we can comfortably give the required 60 day notice.

Beyond the timing of recent events, I can look back and see how the timing of our two year adventure in The Netherlands fit into a bigger timeline. I’m so glad we’ve had time with Kathryn during her last year of high school, time to watch Emma grow, time to be with Pop during in his last moments on this earth, time to say goodbye to Grandma Neivel and grieve with family I haven’t seen in decades, time to help Jenna find the perfect wedding dress and so much more.

Our favorite apples, cider donuts, vibrant orange on the trees, hiking in the woods as the leaves are falling — these are some of the things we missed the past two years. It’s autumn in New England and change is in the air. As the leaves turn colorful and the temps get cooler, Dick and I are continuing to adjust to this phase of our lives. The most recent change is a very, very good one. Dick started a full-time job! He is now an Art Director at a major government contractor. This job answers our prayers and needs in a lot of ways — stable employer, good income, reasonable commute, and an excellent work opportunity at this point in D’s career. He’s on a contract with no benefits, but we can manage without that for now. Dick has been freelancing and working from home for over 30 years, so you can imagine what a big change this is for him. It’s exciting, though!

It’s so weird to be the one staying home as he goes off to work — complete flip from the past five years! I’m adjusting to being alone after being with my husband 24/7 for the last four months. It helped a little that we were apart for a week before he started the new job. I made a trip to New York to visit family and take some classes for a professional certificate.

I’m still “in between” and allowing the pause. In some ways, I feel like I’m gearing up for the next adventure. I’m optimistic that it’s just around the corner. I had a phone interview recently and there are a few other irons in the fire. I’m taking advantage of continuing education opportunities and doing lots of reading to bone up on some topics and just absorb some really good stuff. I’m addressing some physical issues (nothing serious) and processing (or reprocessing) some emotional residue. I’m not thrilled about being in the “change of life” phase 😛, but I intend to persevere!

It’s been difficult to close the last chapter and sometimes I miss our life in Nederland so much (damn Facebook memories!), but I know there are more adventures ahead. Let’s see what happens next! 🙂