The Wild Rose

It’s been about 9 months since we’ve been out of the country, so it was about time for us to hit the international road once again. This time we went to the home of Volvo, Carl Larsson, the Nobel Prizes and most importantly (at least to us) the home of IKEA. Sweden.
70 years ago the then 17 year-old Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA, opening the first store in Almhult. Britt has several days of meetings here at IKEA Headquarters, and at the end of the week we are headed to Stockholm.

Fast forward to today and in addition to the original store (which is now closed and being turned into a museum) there have been 20 more IKEA-related buildings put up, including the hotel where we are staying. Almhult is a rather small town, so to have 21 IKEA buildings makes it feel as if it should be renamed to IKEA-ville.

Because Almhult is so far south, we ended up flying into Copenhagen and taking a train across the Øresund (Danish strait). All of our travels were uneventful, and in total it took us 18.5 hours to get here from Houston.
For the past two years Britt and I have been dodging cold winter weather via India and Texas, and being the kind of people who enjoy colder weather, we were delighted to step off the train in Almhult to temperatures in the 30’s (F) and everything covered in a blanket of snow. We were running on about 3 hours of sleep since leaving the previous day, so we went out for a quick bite to eat and a walk through the snow before we came back and crashed at 7pm.

Of course since we fell asleep so early we were wide awake at 3am, but with the beautiful scenery and snow falling we didn’t mind. Today (Tuesday) Britt has meetings, and I am heading out to explore the non IKEA side of Almhult.