July 8 Brosarp - Simrishamn

After a morning of sleeping and blogging, this afternoon we set out to tour Sweden's Oesterlin - "land of the east," offering the prospect of passing through charming farming communities enroute to idyllic fishing villages along the Baltic coast. So I cranked up the GPS and off we went. After a while, we indeed began to experience charming rural farming communities.

We came upon a lovely (and ancient) rural church, its graveyard full of Anderssons -- no Andersons that I could find.














After an even longer while, we continued to experience even more charming and more rural farming communities, with even narrower roads, some of them surfaced with gravel or not surfaced at all. We spent quite some time behind an (always worrisome) truck loaded with unsecured boulders, moving at a crawl on a road where passing would have been unwise. Especially passing a truck loaded with unsecured boulders.


Eventually the GPS lady ordered us to turn into a particularly unpromising looking road. Obediently, we followed her command. The road soon petered out at the door of a charming farmhouse. Two large, charming German shepherds and several other assorted dogs charged our car and tried their hardest to get at us through our rolled up windows. Kate said, "I think we're lost. Why don't you get out and ask for directions." I said, "Why don't YOU get out and ask for directions?"

Just then, we encountered an apparition of sorts. A kindly woman approached the car and shooed away the dogs as if they weren't vicious killers. As far as I could tell, she was a reincarnation of my great aunt Anna Erickson.


She helped us understand that we were in a town called Brosarp, and we had been roughly 90 degrees off course for the past two hours. We were about as close to our B&B as we were to our intended destination. The nice lady ran into the house to get us a local map, allowing the dogs one more fling at attempted murder. She returned and GAVE us the map, and we were on our way once more.




From there we found our intended destination in fairly quick order. Simrishamn is an ancient fishing village on the Baltic Sea, which recently became Carmel instead.






We had originally intended to have lunch as part of our excursion, but by the time we finally reached Simrishamn it was dinner time. We had a delicious seafood meal followed by espresso and gelato. That slight curl at the corner of my lips is my impression of a charming rural German shephard.




On the drive home, it looked like we were headed for some rain, but it turned out the rain was in Denmark -- a good 20 miles away.