Exploring Sweden in a Motor Home | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Okay, we are exploring Sweden in a camper van. We’ve done 6 motor home holidays (Switzerland, Norway, New Zealand, Ireland and two trips to France). I mostly love camper van holidays—long dreamy days of watching the scenery go by, long times of lying down and praying while we get to places, writing on my laptop while dinner simmers, camping free in lonely wild places, waking up by the sea or lakes or waterfalls, a different one each day, seeing an enormous number of beautiful landscapes in one trip.
The girls though are 12 and 16 and we are in our late forties; are our days of this sort of holiday numbered? I miss my 24/7 internet coverage. Miss spacious showers and baths; there is more clean up in a camper; more opportunities to show grace.

First night was in a 4 star Stockholm hotel with a wonderful breakfast. Sweden is twice the size of England, with a population of 9 million rather than 60 million. 20% of the population are born elsewhere. I guess that is necessary given the low Scandinavian birthrate (a consequence of the high status of women). Sweden was (as a result??) the first country to outlaw the spanking of children.

There is an untranslatable Swedish word lagom, which expresses the essence of Swedishness, medium, not too much, not too little. We found that in renting our motor home, they went reasonably far in helping us (gave us modems and sims, but the tour was rushed and we are finding out that various things don’t work as they should.

Explored a National Park in Stockholm today—Tyresta. Perfect silence, birds, virgin forest, in one of Europe’s great cities. Wow!!

Please pray that our trip goes well, that we remain conscious of the presence of God through it, and that we show grace to each other, and that we use the opportunities of character development and consideration that spending time in confined quarters offers us.