We rented a small cabin on an overnight trip to Lycksele a couple of years ago, and Lydia has been jonesing for another cabin fix ever since. Last week a friend of ours pitched a tent out at the local campground for a few days, and Lydia suddenly remembered that there were cabins there. CABINS, I say! Practically right in our midst! She did her best to convince me that she and I should rent one and spend a night there, and the sooner the better. A quick check into prices put the kibosh on that (they run 400 SEK, or about $60 US, per night), but Lydia’s cabin fervor could not be quelled so easily. Luckily I was able to devise a Plan B.

Olof’s parents have a cabin out in the woods about a half-hour’s drive from here, and I suggested to Lydia that we could go out as a family and spend a night there instead of renting a cabin. Though we’ve been out there fairly often for dinners and berry-picking and the like, we had never slept over. After some consideration she agreed, and we set Thursday as the day.

Because our mid-size sedan is pretty low on extra space once all the people are buckled in, but we didn’t want Asbjørn and Lucy to miss out on the fresh country air, Olof’s mom and dad came by our house on Thursday afternoon and took them to the cabin for us. We all had dinner together before they went back home and left us to our own devices.

Aside from the mosquitoes and the marked lack of darkness–at home we have dark blinds on our windows and don’t notice so much–we spent a cozy, relaxing evening and night. In the morning we had some breakfast and tidied up some, then Petra took a nap and I settled in with my book while Olof took Lydia and Tage down the road to the beach. By the time they got back, Lydia was more than ready to go back to electricity and running water, and we hadn’t brought food for lunch, so we loaded up the car and made for home. On our return trip, we crowded the dogs in with us, Lucy on Lydia’s lap in the backseat and Asbjørn in mine up front. Lydia complained most of the way home about Lucy getting “dog spit” all over her, but I daresay I had a worse deal, what with Asbjørn having rolled in some kind of manure on one of his walkabouts. Delightful.

All in all it was a good time, and we’re talking about spending a few days out there later in the summer, maybe after the blueberries are ripe. Tage hasn’t stopped talking about it since we left; for some reason he calls it “the scary house,” but apparently doesn’t consider that a bad designation. Lydia’s enthusiasm seems perhaps to have waned a little, but not so much that she won’t be up for another trip. And Asbjørn … I think he’s already counting the days until we go back. We very nearly couldn’t get him to leave. This is him still standing on the porch, when all of the rest of us were at the bottom of the the hill in the car. He refused to budge, and in the end Olof had to go back up there and drag him down at the end of a leash. If I’d known then what he’d been up to out in the woods, I may just have agreed to let him stay.