West across Sweden

This morning we slept in (actually I slept in). Last day in Uppsala and onward to the west. I had not driven much so I was ready to give the Ford diesel a nice long drive. We had a leisurely breakfast at the hotel, packed, got the car out of the cheaper lot the hotel provided, and headed west toward Norway. It got rural pretty fast as we got bedroom community distance away from the cities. I was expecting small farms and agricultural valley and what we discovered instead is northern Maine, Swedish style. They do grow a lot of crops which I think the wine infused women the other night said was rapeseed. There is another crop that they grow that is light green and we never did find anyone to ask what it was. But the lupines were everywhere. This part of Sweden is sort of like northern Maine but with a few more people and a few more valleys that have been growing crops. There are a lot of conifers which appear to be actively harvested and also a lot of paper mills tucked into the sparse towns. Again, unlike Maine, people have been living here a long time so it has a lived in feel with old roads and old wooden buildings. Also we noted that someone got a deal on red paint because pretty much every building is painted red with white trim. We also noted that McDonalds has moved in with one at almost every intersection along the 4-laners. We never did stop to see what was on the menu.

Most of the cars here are Saabs, Volvos, BMWs and Fords. It is interesting that a couple of times a day we see old restored big metal cars from Detroit so they are either brought here by car buffs or left over from when (if) they were imported back in the 50's and 60's. The roads are in wonderful shape (unlike home) which I read as Sweden taking care of the public wealth at the expense of private wealth (aka taxes).

The other item of note is that we kept seeing pregnant mothers and babies everywhere in what seemed like way out of proportion. I looked it up and Sweden has a birth rate of 12.5 per 1000 and Vermont has about 10 so it is not way out of whack. What someone here noted was that with the government focus on family, mothers and fathers spend a lot more time with their kids (Sweden requires 1 year maternity leave of companies), so you see them out and about more at all the parks and public spaces Sweden provides for its people. Sweden has a tax to GDP ration of 46% while we have a ration of about 24%, so they get taxed a lot more, but get retirement, health care, better roads, etc in return. So we took some back roads to see how things were out back and it was more of the same. We are sensing that our language issues are going to get rougher as we leave the cities and by the time we got to the North Sea this afternoon, it was pretty obvious we would have to work harder with the language thing. They still speak English but not nearly as well as in Stockholm.

We found our hotel after circling a bit and after asking around we were pointed to a small town on the sea where there were lots of nice restaurants. The village is a fishing village where the real working class Swedes come on Holiday. Lots of really fresh seafood eaten right next to the boats they came in on. The specialty is oysters, crawfish, and lobster. We did not order them, but most folks had mounds of crawfish either not yet eaten or picked clean on their tables. Again, it is light late here so it is easy to stay out too late. Tomorrow we poke around the small villages on the coast and explore some Bronze and Iron Age UNESCO World Heritage sites. Still have not seen a moose but will let you know...

P.S. I got 50 MPG today,yipee!!