Sweden Road Trip 2006- Day 13

It is good to be on road, but it is great to be home. We made it home safely and soundly late at night. We said that we would not unpack the car, but of course we do (though we left some things in the car). Overall I have to say that it has been a surprisingly nice trip. It is not surprising because of M and N. I knew that we were going to enjoy our time together. It was the country/landscape that was a bit surprising.

I believe it was Francis Mayes that said that a sign of a good place was that you would want to move there. I think that the sign of a great/amazing place is that you would like to live there and the sign of a good place is that you want to come back. Not too many places on the trip would I like to live actually, but several of the places I would like to go back to. The four things that pop into my head are:

1) The glass factory area- in the summer they have a special dinner on the floor f the different factories that is cooked in the ovens.
2) Kivik- in the summer though, this is one of the places I could imagine having a place.
3) Söderåsen National Park- another weekend next fall would be perfect! (http://www.internat.naturvardsverket.se/index.php3?main=/documents/nature/engpark/enpstart.htm)
4) A trip around Vättern- a week long trip seeing and doing things around the lake that we missed or did not have the opportunity to do.

I am sure that there are more places that I would like to visit again from the trip. If we went back, even to places that we did not care for, the experience would be new and different. Some experiences might be better and some might be worse. No one ever really knows for sure. That is why we travel after all- to have good and bad experiences. If everything was always perfect, then travel would be boring. People will recall the bad experiences faster then they will recall the good experiences.

So what is next for us? I really do not know. I have some travel planned with work, but I am not looking forward to it. Then we are free the week after Christmas, but no plans yet. Then it is next year already. The one thing that I will take from this trip is that we need to slow it down even more on our next big road trip. When/if we take the Australia adventure next year, we will need to slow it down a bunch, especially since we will have two kids traveling with us. Maybe we need a test trip before we leave for Australia, Hmm, time to start thinking about that trip.