Temperature: Min 8° C; Max 14°C.
Weather: sunny, then rainy, then sunny, then a shower, then sunny, then pouring, then some sun. . .
Happy birthday, Mandie! It was a wonderful bonus to have our first breakfast all together be on Mandie’s birthday; it’s been many years since I’ve been able to celebrate one with her.
Eskil awoke at 5:10 am, not great but certainly getting better.
We all had breakfast, then eventually got on the road to Nusnäs, where Dalahästen are made. We walked through one of the workshops, visited gift shops, and horsed around. Eskil even painted his own.
Afterwards we went to Rättvik and waited in a car park for a while for the others. We couldn’t do our main errand as the Systembolaget, the state-run liquor store, was closed for the holiday. The goal of the after noon was to find a midsommar festival to join, and we had settled on going to one in South Rättvik as we were told it would be quite authentic. We got to the site ahead of time. It was not warm, and at times it was quite wet.
The celebration continued nearby at the Gärdeby Bystuga (community hall), where we had parked. Walking back to it was lovely; it was a nice neighbourhood on the hillside overlooking Lake Siljan.
The next order of business was to find somewhere to celebrate Mandie’s birthday! They already had a list of restaurants, but the trick was going to find one with space for 8 adults and an Eskil on a holiday. We were scoping out places, and actually wound up waiting right away for a table at the Best Western’s restaurant. This worked out incredibly well for us as Eskil was extremely tired and getting very impatient and cranky. Our wait was lovely as Swedes often have great toys for children around (and as many are from Ikea, Eskil often recognises them as ‘his’). This time though he fell in love with categorising the colours of duplo while making ‘towers’.
Aside from wrangling a tired Eskil, we had a lovely meal with a nice server. We even had a bit of smoked reindeer in our starter. And to top off the meal, there was prinsesstårta! It speaks to how tired Eskil was that he didn’t indulge.
It was an early meal so we could get back and get Eskil and Monkey to bed. He slept, daddy watched him and I lurked in the dining building for WiFi.
More photos can be viewed at https://www.flickr.com/photos/cragg-ohlsson/archives/date-taken/2014/06/21/ and https://www.flickr.com/photos/cragg-ohlsson/archives/date-taken/2014/06/22/ , however the order is all over the place as unfortunately I had left my camera time set to Australia and my phone had reset the time to Swedish time.