Sweden 12c--Halmstad

First, I stand corrected: the literal meaning of Halmstad is Straw City, according to the misspelling and grammatically incorrect Anonymous (also known as TAP). Second, here are some shots of our trip to the beach (and I'll tell you what, the water was cold; I know, I sat in it for close to ten minutes trying to see if it or I would warm up, and no go).Mikah with his pail and shovels on the beach.

Lukas, a natural at any beach, beginning with South Padre Island in deep South Texas when he first visited as a baby.
Check it out: they've also got mini-golf in Sweden. Though here you're not allowed to walk on the playing area. You manage your stroke however way you can from the sides.

Though you might not be able to see it from this angle, Mikah was the consumate player. He'd focus hard, so hard in fact that, like Michael Jordan used to do, Mikah stuck his tongue out before every shot.

And this is a friend of Thomas', Måns (note the correction: I still can't spell in Swedish; sorry, Måns). He did wonders with the boys. You'll notice the pinkish tone to his skin. Both he and Thomas opted out of using the baby sun tan lotion when Tina first offered it to them, which they used the following day.
And here is Thomas. Don't be fooled by what appear to be multi-colored swim trunks. That's the style here: the cool guys wear their trunks on top of their underwear, then let them hang. I was not among the cool guys. And Thomas says that try as he might, he can't tighten the waist on his trunks, and so he's not trying to be stylish, really.
Anonymous in Dubai: can you make out this picture? I did a horrible job of taking a picture of the cottage, but I only remembered to do this as we were pulling out of the sand driveway. With several of us there (morfar, morfar, Tina, Lukas, Mikah, me, Maria, Thomas, and Mänz) we still managed. But one night, my mother-in-law tried sleeping in the van. Sometime during the night, there was, according to Maria (my sister-in-law, whose luggage didn't arrive with her, and was delivered a few days later, right before our trip to Stockholm), a loud knocking on the door, which she initially thought was the result of a drunk having lost his way and thinking he'd been locked out of his own cottage. Really, it was my mother-in-law coming back in because it got cold; "chilled to the bone" is how she described herself.
And finally, from this trip, for the '64 Ford Galaxie aficionados (the very car pictured on the cover of my latest novel, The Whole Sky Full of Stars, to your right and up a bit (I know, I know, shameless self-promotion, but I've got to sell the book any way I can)): taken from our own moving vehicle, a shot of a green and rusting all-American classic.