lovingly made travels: sweden 🇸🇪 copenhagen 🇩🇰 berlin 🇩🇪
a somewhat quick summary of our travels in northern europe
First - apologies for the delay and silence from me the past two Saturdays! We were on this amazing trip that you’re about to read about, and I would have had this done yesterday if our travel home had not been messed up by 1) no wifi on the flight from Munich-Dulles AND 2) the cancellation of our final flight home which led to us driving through the night back to Indianapolis to get home to our son ASAP and relieve our amazing childcare team for them to make their own flight home to California. It was a nice little kick-in-the-pants, welcome-back-to-America moment. Le sigh.
Ok guys, this is a travel post. This kind of post is for a cozy quiet summer morning, the kind of cozy quiet summer morning where you get up before everyone else and take your time to enjoy the casual nature of the world in those early hours of the day.
Who am I kidding? I have a toddler that gets me up at 6am and I got to escape that for 11 days, so I thought this might resonate with a certain population who’s really going through it right now. (Shoutout to all my toddler parents, in case that wasn’t clear.) Grab your coffee or tea — hot or iced, but I’m a hot-coffee-in-the-morning 97% of the time — sit in *your chair*, and fantasize about leaving it all behind ☕️
Travel posts won’t be happening too often in this space - the freelance musician life both can and can’t lend itself well to structured vacation weeks. You’ve got to be ready to get hired at a moment’s notice and pray to god that you’re available. But you can also just pick up and leave, commit to being gone for your own vacation needs, and sacrifice potential work. But late July through August is usually the perfect time to get the travel bugs out of our systems, guilt-free, since this is a mostly dead season in the world of classical music.
These travel posts will act as a little window into my world, moments where you get to know me and what I like to do when I’m not doing the home cook/mom thing. When I travel, I’m more of a wanderer than a doer. I see what I see, get a feel and taste of each place on foot. I try to soak in a city by moving around constantly instead of standing in line for 5 hours to see a famous thing from a farther distance than desired, for less time than desired. I move at my own pace through backstreets instead of being shoved around by all the bodies crowding the main streets and museums. I do love a museum, but I find it so hard to choose one when I’m in a new city. Naturally, I agonize over this decision. The next time I go, I’ll have a better idea of what I might have missed on my first visit.
Choosing restaurants is usually a game-time decision and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I research general ideas of what I would like to eat in certain cities and all sorts of places bookmarked on Google Maps ahead of time, categorized with emojis by food/drink types. Reservations are made for the places that I feel are absolutely necessary culinary experiences, but this trip had absolutely none of that, which was liberating, exciting, and sometimes frustrating. Those who know me well know that I’m not usually so flexible of a person. So good on me!
Why were we in Northern Europe besides just traveling for fun? We were picking up our Volvo in Sweden! Long story short (because I’m mainly here to just show photos of favorite foods and things), we did their Overseas Delivery Program :
In February, we placed an order from the factory (located in Gothenburg, Sweden) through our dealership in Indy
Volvo flew us roundtrip and put us up in a hotel for a couple nights, did a World of Volvo tour (no factory tour since most of Sweden is on holiday during the summers, so lucky), to PICK UP OUR CAR
Volvo is shipping the car back to us by early October
Scott and I have been talking about this for at least 10 years, so we YOLO’ed a little bit. Actually, it was a pretty practical YOLO because we needed a second car, but were not in a rush to get one, and we wanted to go to Europe. No brainer. If you want to know more about our experience with the Volvo OSD program, feel free to reach out!
Anyway, there are enough words here. I won’t narrate the whole trip, only some. You get it. Honestly I would have put more pictures in here, but Substack said this issue would be too big for your emails - sad.
Anyway, here are the food/drink/etc highlights from our trip! Cheers!
The first couple of days were spent in Gothenburg.
After a quick nap after our long travel day, we wandered the old town and rode roller coasters at the Liseberg amusement park (in the city!). The next day we went to World Of Volvo museum and picked up our new car! We drove it up to Smögen, an adorable fishing village about 90 min north. We wandered, we drank little beers on the water at Smögenbryggarn, ate moules frites and an open-faced shrimp sandwich at Göstas Fiskekrog. Delightful!
Next we had our weekend road trip to Stockholm.
Delicious Armenian food at Yerevan Mangal in Örebrö. Adorable fika (Swedish tradition of an afternoon coffee + pastry) with my adorable husband at Tant Bruns Kaffestuga and super old church ruins in Sigtuna. Stockholm views from Södermalm, then a fantastic dinner at Restaurant Måsen. Morning pastries at Stockholm chain bakery Fabrique Stenugnsbageri and old town wanderings. One of the best banh mi’s of my life from Thi Thi Baguette. Meatball dinner at Restaurant Pelikan, then drinks at Tjoget. Before driving back to Gothenburg, we went to the Vasa Museum and gazed in awe at this giant ship that sank almost immediately on its maiden voyage and sat in the Stockholm archipelago for 333 years and then was brought up and restored. 11/10, incredible. We stopped in Gränna for polkagris (Swedish hard candies, traditionally a peppermint flavor) and another fika. Last stop was at the Brahehus castle ruins at a rest stop — most incredible views over Sweden’s 2nd largest lake.
And then there was Copenhagen!
Classic canal walking — crowded but fun. Hart Bakery — amazing. Smørrebrød at Aamans 1921 — open-faced sandwiches with as much delicious stuff as you can possibly balance on top. (I think I was won over by pickled herring more than I’d like to admit.) We ate dinner at Bar Amore with an old music school friend living in Copenhagen, then we went to Ruby — I didn’t get a single picture of our drinks, because time spent catching up with old college friends brings out our old college selves 😉, but the cocktails were *incroyable*
Last stop - Berlin.
This city was less about food and more about friends. I put my trust completely in some friends from Indy who currently live and work there, and they did not disappoint! First, they took us to a wonderful Middle Eastern place called Simsim. Awesome mezze selections. For lunch, one of the many great döner kebab places was visited. Intimidatingly large, as big as my head. So delicious. We wandered around the Mitte section of the city and had a very powerful visit to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. A darling beer garden on a lake in a giant park after a long walking day was a treasure — Café am Neuen See — and not just beers, a whole variety of foods for everyone to enjoy before/after taking a rowboat out on the lake. Rowboat people-watching is a thing I never knew I needed in my life. We found the Brother’s Kiss 😘 on the East Side Gallery, a collection of artwork on a section of the former Berlin Wall. And a final bakery visit at Bekarei, a Portuguese-Greek bread and pastry place, before heading to the airport - perfection.
Thank you, dear reader, for reading about and looking at my travels. There won’t be many quite like this for a while, like years. But whenever I do travel away from home, I will share the things that stood out to me and hope that you get to do them someday too.
❤️ Sarah