Time is flying by and it’s getting harder to keep up with everything. It seems strange to be starting my last week in Sweden. I’ll be sad to leave but very happy to be home!! I’ve done a lot with the Hedlund Family sense I’ve writen last so lets see if I can get it all typed out! Upon inspiration from my grandma I have been doing a good job of keeping a journal of my trip so that makes it easier to remember everything!

Thursday, July 29th, was my first real day with the Hedlunds, because I had been at the 4-H camp. Jill, the mother, had to work so was left in the care of Jessie (17) and Felicia (12). We got up a good time and caught a bus to Borgholm. It is a summer town in Northern Örland, meaning that it is very dead and vacant in the winter. We were heading to their king and queen’s summer house. We had to walk quite a ways from the but but as we walked we passed an old castle ruin and lots of other good photo opportunities so that helped it go by much faster. The royal summer house was much smaller than I expected, and it was an Italian style house. Queen Victoria built is a long time ago, because she had bad health and Örland is know for its fresh air. She modeled the house after her doctors home, who was from Italy. The house was small but the garden was not, it was huge and that is the part where we were allowed to walk around, because the royal family still uses this as their summer home. While walking in the garden we came up on a security guard and a lady picking some flowers, we just walk right by with no real reason to think anything of it. It wasn’t until the next day when one of Jessie’s friends that works at the summer home told us that the King and Queen were there, and we realised that the lady picking flowers was actually their Queen. So that was neat, I just wished we had known that sooner! After the summer house we walked about 15 minutes into Borgholm. We just spent some time shopping around and got some ice cream. We caught the bus back and Jessie and Felicia got off at home I stayed on and went to Kalmar to meet Jill to play volleyball. Every Thursday Jill meet with a group to play intramural volleyball. It was fun!

Friday morning Jessie and I took their moped, which I really liked, to a near by store and got some chocolate to make chocolate chip cookies. Felicia helped us too and I think I got them all hooked on them!! Jessie’s friend Bella met us and we all took the bus into Kalmar to meet Jill to go canoeing around the city. I really liked this! We stopped an had a little picnic snack on the lawn looking up at the castle in Kalmar, which is something you can’t do in Kansas. That night Jill arranged for me to go with another 4-Her, Jessica, who was my age and I had met her at the 4-H farm a week or so ago. I had a great time getting to meet all her friends, they were all very welcoming and liked to ask me questions about the U.S. They were also all very good in English, one had his masters in English Translation and another had just gotten back the day before from England so that was nice to talk with them.

Saturday was a very full day, but I got to see a lot of Örland! Jill, Felicia, and I drove up along the West coast of Örland and looked at all the old fisherman’s boat houses and the beautiful coastline. We also stopped and had some lunch along the rocky coast directly across from the Blue Virgin Island, which has a tale about witches and bad luck attached to it. They say that if you take a rock from the island you will have bad luck for life, Jill said their local government is always getting packages from around the world full of these rocks that people have taken and then had bad luck. So we just looked at the island from afar. After lunch we continued North to the Troll Forest. Here they have a museum display with lots of little huts full of educational information and games, mostly for little kids. They also have several different walking paths. We took a short walk through the forest to a pebble beach on the East side of Örland. I wanted to spell something out in rocks, so we decided that U.S.A. would the be easies. We then got back in the car and made it to the most northern tip on Örland, (remember I said it takes about two and a half hours to drive the length but only ten minutes to drive the width of Örland). Here they have one of their two lighthouses, the other is on the Southern tip and is much taller.  Felicia and I went up to the top, it was a very pretty view of the island and the ocean. At this point we were all pretty pooped, so we found a nice beach and had a snack and a nap. They had lots of jellyfish in the water, which I thought looked scary but Jill assured me that they were harmless, and they were, I had just never seen so many. After our nap we met up with Jessie and went to a stable where Jill had to take care of a friend’s horse while they were on vacation. So we also got to go riding for a bit, I’m getting really good at English Style;). We got home around 10:00 that night and went right to bed!

Sunday morning we got up early and went back to the stable to care for the horse again. We also took a long buggy ride. Jessie drove the horse and buggy and Jill rode along beside. Too, the buggy we were riding in belongs to the Swedish Royal Family. It was very peaceful and we drove by the old castle ruin so once again good photo ops. There was a riding competition going on so we watched it for a little while and then came home to rest. Jill also plays volleyball on Sunday night, but on Sundays they play beach volleyball. It was a good workout and afterwards we all jumped in the ocean to get the sand off. It had been a nice day, but the water was very, very cold!!

I still have a lot more to share but that pretty much covers all of last week so I’m going to end this post at that. I’ll work on this week as soon as I can!!