Weekend trip to Astrid Lindgren's World

We had a fantastic weekend at Astrid Lindgren's world in Vimmerby, Sweden. The weekend started out rough with losing several hours Friday afternoon due to car trouble, but my talented husband managed to keep the car going until we had picked up our friends and made it to the auto parts store. There in the parking lot, he performed surgery on the Suburban and somehow made an alternator belt that didn't fit work anyhow. So the car worked perfectly for the rest of the trip, with the exception of the air conditioning which crapped out during our last offroading trip in Anza Borrego. Luckily that's not such a big deal here in Sweden.

This was our first major outing with our Danish friends since our offroading trips in San Diego, so it was kind of a surreal flashback with lush Swedish forests instead of desert. We rented a house for the weekend in the countryside outside of Vimmerby, and even though it was after 10 PM and beginning to get dark, the landlord came out to welcome us. (Which was a very good thing since we weren't sure if we'd found the correct place--no street names or numbers, only landmarks such as hen-house and garage.)

We spend much of both Saturday and Sunday at Astrid Lindgren's World. While I thought admission was quite expensive, the two-day family package was a pretty good deal, and it was good not to feel rushed. I'd been expecting something more like Disneyland with rides, and at first I was a little disappointed that there weren't any. However I quickly warmed up to the low-tech playgrounds that encouraged creative play and the frequent performances with characters and music from the books/films/TV series that I'd guess pretty much everyone in Scandinavia has grown up with. The kids loved it, and they often got the opportunity to meet the characters after the shows and explore the settings. The shows were particularly good in that they encouraged interaction with the kids, and while everything was in Swedish, language skills were not required to follow along.

A thunder storm on Saturday afternoon forced us into the shops, and we soon left the park when the kids got whiny and the husbands got bored. We decided to check out a "folkrace" that was also going on in town. This is an interesting Swedish thing where ordinary people race beat up old cars on a dirt track. The cars can be bought at the end of each race for a fixed amount (less than $1000), so this keeps people from investing a lot of money into high performance options. I was amazed how much the kids loved it. Even the moms had to admit that it was at least a huge improvement over tractor pulling that we'd seen at a fair in Denmark earlier this summer.

My daughter was cheering especially for the Volkswagen beetles which she called Herbie cars. Unfortunately two of them crashed causing one to roll, and she was totally traumatized. She talked about that poor car for the rest of the weekend. The drivers both walked away, but she wasn't concerned about them--just that the car had been wrecked and even if they fixed it, it may never be as nice again.

OK, one of my cats is now chasing a gopher around under my desk. This is rather disconcerting since both cats have been indoors for the past several hours. Maybe they brought it in earlier and it got away. Fortunately it seems pretty badly injured, so I hope it won't get away again. I hope they either eat the entire thing or leave the carcass intact somewhere easy to find but not where somebody will step on it in the morning. It's 11 PM and I'm too tired to deal with this.