Sundsvall and Carl Erik Olof Ekstrom

Picked up our rental from Avis, a clever little VW Golf, does lots of thinking for you, tricky little switch for a handbrake, the engine switches off at the lights, cruise control is just that, it brakes, speeds up and maintains following distance (no tailgating). I also renewed my tetchy acquaintance with TomTom who still tries to send me down one-way roads the wrong way (just 5 minutes after I picked the car up. It was a circuitous drive back to the hotel to pick up Ann and the bags, TomTom issues, driving on the unfamiliar side of the road, one-way streets, but we got there and it took longer than the walk! Packed the car and headed off, a few more technical issues (TomTom switches off, low battery) but we got onto the E4 northbound with just one toot. The sceptics among you will say “Yes, the Europeans are very tolerant drivers” while those in the travelling party would say “very skilfully executed”.

We drove through 400 km of low rolling hills, covered in scrubby Baltic pines and another tree the name of which eludes me, but the same one Ross had a close experience with in the middle of the night on the banks of the Waikato River in Ann St. A small diversion to Hudiksvall, an old fishing port for a light lunch, and we arrived in Sundsvall at about 2.30 pm.

 

Check-in was followed by the obligatory walk around the town centre and into the Tourist office. A very helpful lady gave us lots of background and local information; we left there well equipped.

Sundsvall centre is full of lovely buildings all built by timber barons after the town burnt to the ground in midsummer 1889. The town centre buildings are uniformly ornate and the place looks very elegant.

 

Our digs, the most expensive for the whole trip, are very grand. The Elite Hotel Knaust is, we are told, built in German Rennaissance style. The internal staircase is a real Princess staircase according to Abi and I’m sure the Princess Sophie fans in Wellington would agree. Each step is hewn from a single piece of white Carrara marble and the style is double spiral baroque. Reputedly a timber baron once rode his horse up the stairway......

 

Breakfast, in the beautiful 120 year old Spegelsalon, is something to behold, and the locals are very focussed on constructing a substantial breakfast of choice. In the interests of brevity, I won’t describe the whole offering, suffice to say you need to be reasonably fit just to walk the length of the breakfast serving bar. For the rest, our room is very comfortable, staff are excellent and the facilities great.

Wednesday we downloaded  our NZ voting papers and sent the forms away. A bit of a long story for one day after dinner, but as an experience it was a mix of the new (download the papers) and the very old, one piece of paper into one envelope, the second into another envelope, then both of those into a third and hey presto you are done, all up to Swedish Post now.

We had arranged to meet Dag and his brother Svante who had very generously been doing some chasing down of Carl Erik Olof Ekstrom (aka Nilsson), my great grandfather. Dag is a friend of Reidun and Kim who we met on our walk in the Douro valley back in 2012. He was born here in Sundsvall. Dag had told me  a few days ago that they had found the village where Carl Erik was born and had arranged to meet the farmer who owns the farm and who lives there. Janne's family have held the property for around 500 years.

 

So we turned up at the appointed hour and had a chat with Janne the farmer (retired) and then went in for a coffee. To this point we were impressed with events, I had tried previously to locate Akrom and had never been able to find it. The 'village' is a collection of houses and buildings belonging to three adjacent farms, not a commercial centre and Akrom is the area rather than a place.

We were joined by Karin, another of the neighbours who is well versed in the area’s history and has links into the local church. Janne’s father had done the Sellen family quite a few years ago, so we sat, chatted, had coffee and looked over both family trees. We were all very surprised to find that Per Persson, Carl Erik’s great grandfather and Janne’s great grandfather Jon Persson were brothers. As in all genealogical things everything requires authentication twice, and Karin will look for more proving documentation. It all looked pretty convincing to Janne and to me, and it was quite an emotional moment. I hadn’t expected to do/find anything other than a spot on the map, to find related people was just fantastic. There is lots more detail, on the farm and the area, on Janne and his family but we’ll have to find another way to convey all that. We visited the church where my great great great forebears are buried, and the local museum today which has an archive section. Here we poured over church records to update and validate some of the data that Dad obtained back in 2001.  In summary a very successful start to the Heritage tour. Contact details were exchanged and I’m sure we’ve done our bit for Tourism NZ - time will tell.

 

We then went to have a look at Dag’s restoration project. In 1962-65, at the age of 23, he and a friend sailed around the world in an 8m clinker built yacht. Dag has been restoring Lunkentuss so that it can be placed on display in the waterfront area of Sundsvall in recognition of this feat. When Dag started the project the yacht was in very poor repair after some years of neglect and storage.   Dag’s workmanship is very good and Lunkentuss looks fantastic. The voyage was an amazing feat, but it’s a long time and a long voyage in 8m of yacht! Dag has lived in Majorca for 40 years, and he’s returned to Sundsvall to complete this project, staying with his brother Svante while he is here. We are very grateful to both of them for their sleuthing on our behalf.

Next day we headed further north to an area known as the Hoga Kusten (High Coast). This is a World Heritage area which is lifting about 8mm per annum, faster than anywhere else in the world. It’s lifting after being relieved of its coating of 3000m of ice at the peak of the last ice age. The ice age finished around 9600 years ago and the High Coast has lifted about 300m since then, but has lifted more than 800m from the peak of the Ice Age around 20,000 years ago. It’s very picturesque, lots of lakes, sea inlets islands and a landscape rounded by ice and grinding. It is mostly granite with a thin topsoil cover, but some farming in the valley floors. The shore is generally flat and rocky like at Rotsidan.

                                              

                                               

The sea has a minimal tidal range, haven’t checked, but probably only 2-300mm. There are plants are growing just a few metres from the sea and only mm above high tide level, obviously not too many storms! We are out of tourist season, so found a very pretty and peaceful spot for lunch at Bonham. The weather has been superb so far, temperatures around 21 degrees, the locals are astounded, it is warmer than it was in June at midsummer.

We had yesterday in Sundsvall which is celebrating its Stone festival. The city burnt to the ground again (third time) in June 1888, and the city fathers decided to rebuilt in stone to prevent this happening so easily again. The outcome is a fantastic collection of buildings in a relatively uniform style and a beautiful town centre. Dotted around the street are dragons of various sorts. There is a  dragon  on the spire of one of the newly constructed (1889) buildings in the town square which is supposed to protect the town from any further fires. So far it has worked, but only time will tell.

I digress. In 2001 we were sitting on a plane flying to Thailand for a holiday, and there was a young lady sitting next to me who was returning to Australia after a holiday in NZ. Where are you from I asked, and she said, from a small place in Sweden that you won't have heard of called Sundsvall. And I said my great grandfather came from Sundsvall. So we had a great time chatting. Her name was Sara Oosterlund. When she left the aircraft in Sydney, she wrote her address on the Thai Airways menu card with the invitation "if you ever come to Sweden here is my address, you are welcome to visit". The card went into our travel box and I packed it into the papers for this trip. Yesterday afternoon we put Sara's address into TomTom and away we went. We arrived at the address, a little farm on Alno Island. No one around, but quite encouraging to see her surname on the door! I could see someone working a short distance away and the farmer came walking across to me. I introduced myself and showed him the piece of paper with Sara's writing on it. He was absolutely delighted "I know you, Sara has talked about this, and just so happens she is here (visiting) today!! So he called Sara down from the stables. She was surprised and delighted and we had a lovely reminisce and spent a very pleasant couple of hours with the family. The farm is a delightful spot, deer go walking past each night, they are very common and enough around that and they shoot about 50 a year. Fishing close by is great for salmon, size described by the universal hands apart to demonstrate (say 600mm or so). The coast on Alno has lots of summer houses. We've found that "summer houses" also work as winter houses as you go there and go ice skating on a frozen lake or sea, or head off into the snow for walking or skiing.

 

Alno island  has lots of sandy beaches and we had a good explore, grateful that we were not there in tourist peak, especially as the roads are VERY narrow!

 

 

 

So just the mention of Sundsvall in conversation has generated some lovely experiences for us. It is a small world.

The Stone Festival continued today in Sundsvall and we did a bit more walking in the city centre, and learned a bit more about the fire and the area.

The region provided lots of timber for London's buildings at around the time of the fire, and there were lots of wealthy timber barons, the houses that burnt were well insured so there were plenty of funds for the rebuild.

Sundsvall is quite industrial, paper mills, timber mills, an aluminium smelter, so it's a very pretty town with a lot of industry close by.

Then we drove south to Rattvik for an overnight stay. The trip took us through mostly forested areas and lakes, no high country.

 

We arrived late in the afternoon and did a bit of walking in town. The town has a 630 m pier  out into the shallow lake, I guess to provide boating access to the facilities. The dark, brackish looking water is only a metre or two deep for a long way out on the pier.

 

A relaxing drink on our balcony yielded a new form of entertainment. A driverless lawnmower rambling over the beautifully groomed property over the road. They are totally silent and closer scrutiny revealed several doing their thing, apparently with no human direction.

Dinner was a lovely meal of locally sourced food and a very nice pinot noir from Austria. It will probably be vastly superior to tonight's offering on our Arlanda airport overnight stay. It was a lovely spot to view the sunset. Tomorrow we fly to Manchester for the north of England stage.

 

From Swedish we can adopt Hej, or if addressing more than one person HejHej, which is hello and Scott has it in hand already. Pronounced hay or hayhay.

Parkering always tickled us, and ufart and infart are much more melodious than exit and entry.

 

Sweden has been a lovely experience, very friendly and helpful people. Finding more about his forebears, seeing where Carl Erik came from and meeting some of our distant kin has just been a fantastic experience.