Trowels and Shovels

I really enjoyed Double Wars, and the trip to and (most of) the trip home again, but oh, were we tired by the time we finally got home. 

According to Google Maps, the event site is a 15 hour drive to the south of us, if one drives straight through, doesn't stop, and always does the speed limit, no more, no less. No one does that. No one could. Therefore we budgeted extra time. The site opened at 16:00 on Friday, so we hit the road already Wednesday evening, 21 May, at 18:00, stopping in Umeå for a photo at the runestone at the University, in the same building in which I now work. Keldor hadn't seen it before, as last time we tried I was still working for the library, and thus my card didn't let me in that building after hours. This time we also stopped by my office so I could do a quick 15 minute yoga session, as I hadn't had time earlier in the day.

Our next stop was in Sundsvall, around 03:30, for gas and toilet. As we pulled in I saw that the person filling their tank was wearing a sweatshirt with a skull and crossbones on it, so I said "priate!", and Keldor said "that look like Orm. When we got out of the car, Orm came over for a hug. He was on his way home from work, and was planning on starting for Double Wars the next day.

We drove that night as far as the rest area before the Högakustenbron (the bridge on the High Coast), where we laid down on the bed in the back of the van and slept a couple of hours.

We got back on the road at 03:00 on Thursday and drove as far as Keldor's brother's house, a lovely farm in the forest about half way between Gävle and Örebro, where I did my yoga and took a nap, and Keldor drank coffee and caught up with his brother, who was working nearby enough to take a long coffee break and join us (it was around 09:00 when we arrived).

While we were there Keldor picked up some baverhjöt that his brother had prepared. Baverhjöt is a traditional beverage in some parts of Sweden, that many people have never tasted. One makes it by taking the scent glands near a beaver's anus (the source of castoreum) and putting them in a strong alcohol to soak for a long time. That concentrate is then diluted with much more alcohol to become a beverage with a taste that some few people enjoy, and others regret tasting, if they try at all. It is not very common these days, since one needs access to a dead beaver to make it. Castoreum is also used by the perfume industry and for making painkilling salve, as it is high in acetylsalicylic, so I guess that more scent glands from human-killed beavers are used for these rather than becoming baverhjöt, if they are used at all, and I hope that far more beaver die of old age somewhere unnoticed by humans.

Keldor is one of the people who find the taste of baverhjöt pleasant in small quantities, so it amused him greatly to take a small bottle of baverhjöt around to the various evening parties at the event and offer it to people. A few people enjoyed it, a few people regretted being curious enough to taste it, many more were wise enough not to try it (I didn't even try to smell it). But there were enough people who tasted it that the small bottle he'd mixed from the concentrate was empty by the end of the event. He still has some of the concentrate to mix and bring to another event.

But back to the road trip... After leaving his brother's house, we continued on to his sister's place in Vadstena. We had expected to take more time for that part of the trip, as the sun was up, and there are plenty of rune stones to go look at between the two houses. However, it was a rainy day, so we only stopped at three runestones, which meant that we got to Vadstena around 14:00, and went pretty much straight to sleep, getting back up after his sister and her husband were home from work to be sociable for a while before returning to bed for a good nearly eight hours of sleep.
 
On Friday we enjoyed a leisurely morning, packed the things his sister would need at the event into the van, and hit the road at 09:40, giving us just over six hours to do a 4.5 hour drive, so we planned to take in a few more runestones. However, instead we stopped for photos for the view of Braehus from below, and at the cute little town of Grenna, the Polkagris (peppermint candy) capital of the world (first time we have taken that route), where we bought snacks, honey , and a "weather station" (rock on a string) from a cute tourist trap, and the small bottle of alcohol Keldor needed to dilute the baverhjöt. A bit later in the trip we picked up some groceries for the event, which used up the extra time nicely, meaning that we arrived onsite at 16:12 (site opened at 16:00).

I will try to do another post about the event itself, so I will jump straight to the home trip, and why we were so tired when we got here.

The first part of the trip home, starting early afternoon on Saturday 31 May, went very smoothly. Keldor's sister joined us for the drive (she'd taken the train to the event on the way down, arriving a few days after we did, as she hadn't wanted to take so much time off of work.  This was her first event since the one she'd visited around 20 years ago).

Our first stop of the trip was in the town of Bjärnum, just over an hour from site, as I wanted a toilet and Keldor wanted to hit a grocery store to buy some Monster energy drinks. However, the grocery store was right next to an antique/second hand store, so, of course, we had to go in. This was a good idea.

I went straight to the loo, so I missed out on seeing Beatrix and Hartman, who were just leaving, but they paused and chatted with Keldor and Rebeccah. Then all three of us found things we needed to buy. In Keldor's case it was a small cannon. Given that every time we visit a castle or museum that has real cannons on display Keldor always hugs it and says that he wants to bring it home, I knew the second I saw the small (~20 cm tall, 30 cm long) brass model of a cannon that it was going to follow us home. The only surprise was that it took Keldor a couple of minutes to convince himself that it was ok to buy it. He tried walking away three times. It has wheels, they work. He bought it, of course. The shop also had a cafe, with an ice cream bar, so our road trip ice cream was of reasonable quality (we had tried to get road trip ice cream in Grenna on the way down, but both shops advertising "homemade" ice cream were closed).

We then drove all the way to Braehus (around 2 hours) before the next toilet break. After that, we tried to see the runestone at Hovgården, but it is in a forest behind a farm, with no nearby parking.  Rebeccah's husband was expecting us soon for dinner, so Kelsor wasn't willing to stop. We did stop at the church a short way up the road from there, that has two runestones, but it was locked so we continued the 10 minutes on to Rebeccah's house, where we had a delightful evening, and got a good night's sleep.

The next morning we returned to Hov and saw the runestone inside the church and noticed that its other runestone is built into the church wall itself, and visible from outside (so we could have seen it the day before, had we made our spot check). But Keldor didn't want to walk the 400 or so meters to try to find the runestone behind the farm, so that will have to wait till we feel more adventurous.

The Runstone Map indicated that there were more runestones in the next town, Bälbjö, a few km away, so we went there. Bälbjö is where Birger Jarl is from, one of the most significant figures of early Swedish history, as it was he who, in the 1200's was instrumental in Sweden becoming a unified Kingdom under a single king, rather than a bunch of small Kingdoms

From there we made our way gradually northwards, stopping at the occasional runestones. We sent a note to Hjälmer and Sofie, who live just north of Uppsala, to see if they were home and wanted a visit. They did, but were on their way home from a visit with his family, and said they would be home in about four hours. We were just over a two hour drive from their place by then, so we had plenty of time for sightseeing, and enjoyed the stops.

One of the stops included turning at a sign that said "fresh honey", and arriving at the farm on time to see the beekeeper returning from his hives, still in his protective gear. He had only one jar of the fresh stuff currently bottled, so while we waited he went and filled two more, so we would have one to give to Hjälmar and Sofie, one for us, and one to display to the next visitors. 

Then, when we were around a half an hour from Hjalmar's place the "electric fault" warning light on our dashboard went on, so we stopped at a nearby gas station, saw nothing obviously wrong, and when we restarted the vehicle the warning light was gone. So we proceeded down the road.

Some minutes later the light came back on, so we stopped at another gas station, and this time, when Keldor lifted the hood, the car's drive belt was sitting at an odd angle, so he touched it, and it lifted right out, no longer a loop, but now just a flat band. Given that this is the part that transfers electricity from the alternator to charge the battery, it is no surprise that the light read "electric fault". We quickly checked with google, to see what else it does (the Swedish name for it is "multirem" as it is a belt that fills multiple functions), and saw that, among other things, it operates the engine cooling system.

Google was clear that a car can be driven without one, for as long as the battery lasts, but it is very bad to run the battery completely flat. Given that it was 19:00 on a Sunday, in the countryside about a half an hour from the nearest workshop or car part store, which were all closed), we decided to unplug everything electric we could, and risk it.

That was a rather stressful half an hour, as Keldor drove with one eye on the road, and another on the car's temperature gauge, but we made it there safely, and managed to find a parking spot not too far from the entrance to their apartment building.

Luckily, they had a battery charger, so we brought in the car battery and charged it over night so that we would be able to get it to a shop. We had no idea if it was only the broken belt that was an issue. It was a clean break, with no other sign of wear, so there could have been something else that triggered it, but, whatever the cause, clearly we weren't getting home without a new one.

Keldor was pretty certain that replacing the belt was something he could do, if we had a way to lift the car, but we didn't, and it seemed worth letting professionals do it, as they could troubleshoot to see if anything else was wrong.

We also took advantage of the extra tim in town to take the pavilion and ground cloths out of the car and spread them out on the balcony to dry. They were mostly dry before we packed them, but they were much more dry after airing on the balcony for a night, so it was worth the effort of carrying them up.

At 07:00 the next morning (the earliest any of the local car repair shops opened) I was on the phone trying to find a shop that had time to see us right away. The first several ones in the area were busy, but the first of the "opens at 08:00" set I tried said "not today, but we could take a look tomorrow if you like".

So we booked the appointment, and took Monday as a rest day, other than driving the car over to the workshop in the early afternoon, leaving the keys with them, and walking back to the apartment, stopping at the archaeological excavation between the two to chat briefly with them.

It is a pre-construction investigation, and we had only missed a tour and lecture for the public by a couple of hours, but when I identified myself as working at Umeå University for Swedigarch the guy relaxed and filled me briefly in. It is a late Bronze Age or perhaps early Iron Age settlement, and he was able to point out the postholes from the longhouse that they had uncovered. I would have loved to have heard more, but I didn't want to take more of his time; they have a short deadline to get as much info as possible, and possibly find some artefacts, before the bulldozers clear away the evidence to make way for the new foundations.

After Hjälmar and Sofie got home from work we had time to be sociable with them before heading to sleep. On Tuesday morning we relaxed and waited for a call from the shop. When I hadn't heard anything by 13:00, I gave them a call, and was told that they had just finished lowering the car from the lift.

They'd done the trouble shooting, and couldn't find any direct problem with the electrical system other than the broken belt, which they had replaced, and done a test drive to confirm that the battery is once again charging, and they should be completely ready with it in about 20 minutes. That being how long the walk to the shop takes, we got ourselves ready to head over directly.

By 14:30 the car was re-loaded, my water bottles refilled, and we were ready to go. At that point Hjälmar was still a half an hour from home. Given that we still had a seven hour drive to do (if we didn't stop), we made the painful decision to head out directly, rather than waiting for him to get home for one last hug (which, realistically, would have taken at least another half an hour of chatting before we actually set out).

So we set off north, more than 30 hours later than we had originally planned. An hour later we stopped in Gävle to go to a grocery store and visit a toilette, and were lucky enough to see a stand selling fresh strawberries, so I bought a box, and ate them all quite happily.

The next stop was at a beautiful farm in Tröndal, to pick up a quarter of a tree trunk to bring north for Oscar to make archery bows out of. The farm belongs to the parents of Henrik, and I fell head over heels in love with it. I don't want to live further south than I do, but if they were to offer me that farm, I would move in a heartbeat (luckily for my job, they aren't going to so offer). I didn't take any photos of the farm (it didn't feel right to do that in front of the owners; I didn't want them to wonder if I was casing the joint or something, but I did compliment them on it. 

Then we stopped at the medieval stone church just up the road, and got photos of that, but we didn't try to find the Vendel Age burial mounds in the area that they had mentioned, as we really needed to head home.

About a half an hour later I was still hungry, so we stopped at Hudviksvall for dinner at the diner Glada Hudvik, which really surprised Keldor. First that I was willing to eat anything at 18:00, which is late enough that my appetite has often turned off already for the day, second that I was interested in restaurant food at all (I am such a fussy eater that it is really hard to find anything I will eat on a typical restaurant menu, if it isn't Asian or Indian food, which has more in common with the way I cook), third that I ordered the spaghetti with meat sauce (normally I eat only wild game or reindeer on the rare occasion that I eat meat at all), and fourth that I ate all of it (to be fair, I had ordered a child's sized serving--I couldn't have finished a bigger one), and fifth, that I even ate some of the french fries that came with his meal (I haven't eaten deep fried food in years, but just then, they looked good, so I did).

An hour later we paused again, in Sundsvall this time, at a gas station to use a toilette, and then went up the hill to the open air museum Norra Berget, where they once held a Nordmark Coronet tournament in the 1990's. Keldor made finals in that tournament, so he remembers the site fondly, and he wanted to show me the statue of the Skvader, a mythical creature that has the front end of a rabbit, and the back end of a bird. We couldn't find the big statue he remembers (which, according to google, was taken out some years back due to damage from ants), but we found a smaller, cute skvader statue to look at, and got to stretch our legs a bit, including climbing to the top of the lookout tower, as one does.

After that we drove pretty much straight through, with only a couple of toilette stopps. I actually drove a couple of hours, which was good, as that meant Keldor was rested and ready for the final stretch, getting us home safely at 01:30 on the morning of Wednesday 4 June, super tired, and ready to sleep. We unloaded only the ice chest and the bag of pillows that night.