24 August 2008

mushrooms

August 23, 2008

Invest 94 just passed over Trinidad dumping copious amounts of rain on the island and on Whisper, but we're about as far removed from that as we are from the flooding in Vietnam and the humidity at the Olympics. It's nice to be in Sweden, living in an apartment where weather doesn't affect our daily decisions nor threaten the safety of our boat or ourselves. It's a nice break!

We've been spending a lot of time in front of the computer...Hans has been helping his dad draw up 3D images of his construction methods, Kristen has been working with an online publisher, Blurb, to publish the contents of this blog into a hardcover book. In between going cross-eyed from too much computer time, we've been eating fantastic food made by Karin, we've spent a couple days helping out Hans' sister and Hendrik with their house and playing with the babies, and we've biked into Stockholm a couple times for some sightseeing. It's definitely a different hurricane season than last year in the Dominican Republic. There are parts of the DR that I miss, but overall it's nice to luxuriate in first world comforts for awhile.

The Ericsson clan


Strandvagen in downtown Stockholm.

Kristen holds up a KarlJohan mushroom, one of the tastiest finds in the woods.

One day's find. For dinner we had fried mushrooms on crackers and mushroom soup with wine. Fantastic!

Kraftor. A swedish summer tradition: crayfish in a sweet and salty sauce eaten alone or made into small sandwiches.

The other day we went to the Sea History Museum in Stockholm. The first floor displayed old wooden lifeboats powered either by oars or steam engines and the second floor displayed pleasure boats. Most of the boats were beautiful examples of Swedish powerboats in varnished mahogany, but we were proud to find a Vega in the group. While not on display for her beauty, the Vega was one of the most popular sailboats in Sweden for all of its years of production so it earned a spot in the museum.