After having a nice new years dinner at Mikael and Nettan’s Bec and I started our busy schedule. We left the next morning with my family to go and visit my brother and his family. After about 2h in the car we arrived at their house outside of Helsingborg. After opening some late Christmas presents with Leo (their 2,5 year old son) as the driving force we had a nice afternoon there before going in to the city for dinner. The next day we took advantage of the snow and constructed an Igloo (snow house) with a little ski slope at the back, another winter activity of the list for Bec. Then we headed home and the next morning it was of to our summer house on Öland.

I’ve never been there in winter before and there were quite a lot of snow so we had to start by shoveling the snow of the driveway. Once in the house the two main tasks was to get the water and the heating going. We have an open fire place and a wood fired heater so after a few hours the temperature had crept up from around 0′C to a more comfortable 18′C, the water was a bit trickier. Because of the cold the water had frozen in the pipes but after boiling some water from melted snow and pored over the pipes we finally got it going late that night.

We spend the next day driving around the island and around 3pm just before the sun sets Bec and I went for a walk to a famous pottery shop to get some exercise and have a look around. Before we headed home again on Thursday we went in to Kalmar and looked at the old castle and an interesting display about an old shipwreck “Kronan” that sunk outside of Öland in 1676.