A Pilgrimage in Sweden - Before, During and After - Part One
Önnestad, Sweden to begin our long awaited Inn to Inn hike.
Before beginning the tale of our grand adventure I need to catch us all up from my last blog entry on April 1, the day before we left Samuel P Taylor State Park on our way to Colfax to park the RV and car before heading to Europe for most of April and part of May.
We (I?) named the Subaru Lucille because of the black and orange trim colors that are the colors of the San Francisco Giants baseball team. Lucille rhymes with Lou Seal, the name of the Giants mascot. One of the regular walkers in the park whom we have greeted often for two seasons now sent me an email last week with a picture of the empty campsite saying, sweetly, "Even if someone else was parked there your space would feel empty without you there." Our space may be empty for the next several months as there are no new hosts scheduled to arrive in our spot. Anyone interested in applying for the best volunteer, retirement "gig" I can imagine?
Lilacs and a Swallowtail Butterfly in the front yard in Colfax.
Youngest daughter Ruth has finally succeeded in getting Lilacs to bloom on our Colfax property for the first time since we moved there in 1977! I tried many times, but they either died or got eaten by deer, or goats. This particular plant Ruth transplanted from the root suckers of a friend's Lilac.
I thought the ends of these logs were pretty, Rob says they're just logs.
A Canada Goose strutting along New Valley Road about a quarter mile from the house.
We frequently hear and see geese flying overhead and on the nearby ponds, but this was the first time I saw a couple of them closer to the house.
A turkey I spotted shortly after the goose on my morning walk.
Turkeys were not something we ever saw in our neighborhood until recent years.
Rob drove me to the airport in San Francisco on April 5 - he would not leave until April 14.
The plane I would fly on from San Francisco to Copenhagen to meet Sheila.
San Francisco Airport has an outdoor terrace which happened to be very close to my boarding gate, and a nice place to wait for my flight.
A bike/walking path on the way to the B & B where Sheila and I would spend our first two nights in Sweden.
This trip to Sweden was a long planned celebration of Sheila's 50th and my 70th birthdays. When I turned 65 my birthday present to myself was to backpack the 165 mile long Tahoe Rim Trail. I invited anyone who wanted to join me to come along for all or part of that hike and many said they would. Only two did - 18 year old grandson Alex and 19 year old Emily. Emily hiked the first 5 days of that adventure with us and Alex and I completed it - celebrating his high school graduation and my 65th birthday. Not long after that trek in 2016 Sheila and I started talking about hiking somewhere in Europe on an Inn to Inn adventure where we wouldn't have to schlep all of our gear. It seemed like a perfect way to celebrate our 50th (2021) and 70th (2020) birthdays. The hike was supposed to happen during our 50th and 70th years or before we each turned 51 and 71. We were looking at the spring or fall of 2020, or the spring or fall of 2021, but COVID interupted that! Sheila left it up to me to choose the location of our hike. I settled on Sweden because my maternal grandfather's parents were born there. I hadn't paid much attention to exactly where they were born, but selected the Stockholm area to hike in September 2021. Just 5 days before I was supposed to board the plane Sweden closed its border to persons from the U.S. because of new outbreaks of COVID and we postponed our plans until now.
Neither of us really believed this adventure would happen for sure until I arrived in Copenhagen on April 6 and met Sheila who had arrived ahead of me from her home in Cyprus. The location of the hike changed to southern Sweden because in the meantime I had found out where my great grandparents were born - a long way from Stockholm - in the Skåne region in southern Sweden. My great grandmother, Anna Rosenquist, was born in 1866 in Broby or Gryt and my great grandfather, Trued Persson (name changed to Pearson in U.S.) was born in 1862 in Norra Strö. The Air B & B Sheila located in Önnestad was only 7 kilometers from Norra Strö and not far from Broby or Gryt. There was no public tranportation to Norra Strö, but we figured we could walk there as it was only about 4 1/2 miles from our accommodations on our one full day before heading to the beginning of our Inn to Inn hike. However, it was raining pretty steady on Thursday, April 7, so we headed to the train station to go to Broby via train and bus. Our goal was not to find any relatives or even definite history of our ancestors, but simply to walk where they had walked, and we accomplished that.
In front of a rock wall and barn on our way to the train.
I don't know why the history I found says that she was born in either Broby or Gryt (less than 5 miles a part) but we guess that maybe the family moved from one to the other. Also Broby is much larger than Gryt, so maybe that is why the records are not clear.
A gravestone for a Persson - probably the most common surname in Sweden!
Every time we went in a cemetery we'd guess how many graves we'd look at before finding one with the name Persson - it was almost always the first one we saw! We didn't find any Rosenquists, but talking with a Swede she said it was a common name in Sweden now.
Inside the Broby church.
It has a quite plain interior due to fires that destroyed the ancient artifacts and furnishings.
The friendly priest who gave us a tour said, "The inside of the church is quite dull, but on Sundays it is quite beautiful when all the people are here." This church is obviously quite an active parish.
I am creating this blog post while in Cyprus with Sheila and her family. In the interest of saving space in our luggage I did not bring my own computer so am using the family's computer and things aren't working as I'm used to - looks like I'll be doing this blog in segments - more to follow, soon, I hope.
Love hearing about your adventures. My stepson Eric Bowman just bought a house in Woodacre!
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