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Henry and Ingar On August 17, Mom and Dad's anniversary, we stayed the day at Yvonne's, showering, enjoying her deck chairs, shady trees and sunshine. Reading the newspaper I saw an ad for toilet paper named Double Krapp. Now that was something I would buy. Rebecca was the only ambitious one: she pedaled into Gothenburg to use the computer. The inside of Arran's pedal was loose; he tried to fix it, then put on a new one. Arran made spaghetti with a piquant sauce. Yvonne's blueberry tarts supplied the coup de grace. In the morning I had a low tire as we prepared to leave Yvonne's. I changed it. We followed the Gisleden bike route along the coast of Sweden through wheat and oat fields following pancake flat, barely trafficked roads much of the way. When the ocean was out of sight, I thought I was back in Kansas. We climbed one hill and glimpsed a lake. That was all Sharon needed to go down for a quick swim. I started lunch. A gangly cat sniffed us out and we threw it scraps of bread, cheese and cinnamon bun as it alternately purred and hissed at us. On the trail from our lunch stop I noticed my tire was flat again. I quickly ripped out the old tube and inserted a new one while Arran and Rebecca waited. Arran thought it was going to be a long procedure, and took out his book to read. He only managed to read a page before we finished. A few hours later, we rested in a park in Varburg, filled with red flowers, before heading the final nine kilometers to Galtback where friends of Yvonne's lived. Following Yvonne's instructions to look for a "smiling cat" we found Henry and Ingar's. The smiling cat turned out to be a painted concrete statue of a grinning Cheshire. Henry and Ingar had four kids, two boys and two girls ranging in age from five to eighteen. We set up in their backyard beneath a tree. They informed us the temperature of the sea water was twenty-three degrees Celsius. The air temperature was twenty-eight degrees Celsius. There was a three kilometer beach just down from Henry and Ingar's house and Henry goaded us to run right in. "You don't even need any clothes," he teased. |
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