House Cleaning Day & the E4

We didn't do much today but do some projects around the house (like the new blinds in the living room!) and clean the house in preparation of my friend and her husband to arrive. She lives near me back home and we met in a business networking group. Well, I was surprised to see she was planning on being in Sweden during the same time we were! They were visiting a friend who lives just south of Stockholm and they seemed to be up to the challenge of driving up to the Swedish countryside. They ran into a lot of construction which slowed them down so it took them a bit longer to arrive than they anticipated.

My friend Vicki and her husband Paul. I got to enjoy one of my bottles of wine that have been sitting here at the house since I got here. I don't like drinking alone. 

I actually don't really like the E4 which is the main "freeway" in Sweden. My husband and I had a disagreement with that term while I see now he is probably right to call the E4 that name but in my mind ... it is nothing like what I think of by American standards. The E4 (at least north of Stockholm) is basically a one lane road with regular intervals of passing lanes. I find it a much more tedious way to drive as you are almost always behind someone slow. During the passing lane sections, you can actually go the speed limit (110 kph or 68 mph) or even a little faster but then you slow right down again (to around 80 kph or 50 mph because that is how fast RV and cars pulling trailers can go) between the passing lanes.

I guess it is somewhat better than the other highways I have been driving around here. They are much harder to pass cars that are slow. The roads are curvy and less flat so you can't always see where it is safe to pass. Swedes are much more aggressive in their passing than I was comfortable with at first but now I am starting to get the hang of it. There also seems to be very few police who monitor the speed limits. They have speed cameras instead and they don't show up very often and they are well marked so it is easy to slow down when you need to. At least I can go about E4 speeds on the highway around here unless I get stuck behind a big truck or going through a small town.

Anyway, enough about that. I will share some photos I just think are pretty that we took around the house. These are just leftover photos that are from different days that I never found a good place to post them.

There is a certain time of the night when the sun hits the water just right and it turns this amazing blue color.
This is the view from our kitchen window. 

A gift from Maj & Ingvar to decorate the window.
This was taken at 1am when it was about as dark as it gets around here. 

Linnea drew a target on some cardboard. Davin got the bullseye!