After five months on two wildly different continents, living in about a dozen hotel rooms and apartments, our fall/winter trip is slowly coming to an end. I’ve actually been in Sweden for a few days already. Flew into Copenhagen on Thursday. I’m writing this in a hotel room in downtown Göteborg after spending most of yesterday afternoon, evening and night with some of my oldest friends, three of which had no idea I was going to show up and got thoroughly surprised.

While Tommy Sahlin  Jonas Bratt  Lars Olemyr and myself enjoyed a spectacularly tasty dinner accompanied by a seemingly perpetual flow of fermented beverages at Stationen Norsesund, a fabulous little restaurant housed in an old train station near Alingsås, the fifth member of our vintage gang, Joakim Eklund played drums on stage to many old favorite tunes with his Westcoast band.

So, tomorrow, I’ll be eating brunch with daughter Elle who now lives here and then heading south to Vejbystrand where we’ll be settling in for an extended stay. After almost a half year of intense city life with all its benefits and irresistible but not always wholesome appeal, I’m so looking forward to quiet rural life by the sea.

Within the next two weeks, I intend to complete two new book projects and begin creating art for an exhibit in April. And just as I was finishing writing this post, an order for a visualization project appeared in my inbox. There have certainly been a slew of pleasant surprises since returning to Sweden.