Fire and Water

There is a brother in the local Kingdom Hall who is a firefighter, and Christer had arranged for our resident fireman to go take a tour. Eric was kind enough to let us tag along, so Christer, Johan, Eric, and I trekked to the Raddningstjansten. I’ll let him tell you the highlights, but it was really neat. I don’t think it matters how old you are, fire trucks are cool to every boy/man. (And to some women too. Well the trucks were a little different than back home. They were much smaller to start off. The hoses were too. And the seat in the truck all faced forward instead of some or all of the backseats ride backwards. On one of the trucks they have a touch screen computer monitor that the firefighter could push and different compartments would open up, which was totally new for me. No matter what the country was though the basic idea of the truck was the same. Carry people there and go put out the fire. And Blythe is right; pretty much all fire trucks are cool. –Eric) We went back home for a little snack and to get our things, for it was to be a beach day. We packed the lunch and beach supplies, and did the sardine routine once again. It was a 45 minute drive to the island, and we were supposed to take a ferry to the next island, but the driver had left, and then next one wasn’t for a long time. So we had our lunch on the dock, and drove to another beach. The water was cool but pure, and the beach had really nice sand. We swam for awhile, played with a ball in the water, ate some smoked fish, and took in the sun. It was so nice to finally go to a real beach, even if it still wasn’t like home. We went home and had a traditional Swedish meal of meatballs, potatoes, and lingonberries.  There was still daylight left, so we went and played mini golf at a surprisingly difficuld course.   Afterwards we finished watching Phantom of the Opera while enjoying genuine Mariestad beer and ice cream. We were tired from the late night and busy day, so we all went to bed.