Travelogue LIX: Gotland I: Cottage: Guest posting today is our travel companion and daughter, Emily Goodling. With camera in hand, Emily shares part of our journey to Gotland Island with you.
September 19, 2015 My dear parents are visiting from Vermont, and the last stop on their journey is a week on Gotland, a tiny island off the coast of Sweden and home to the breed of sheep they raise on the farm back home. We’ve spent the last couple days driving from one gorgeous end of the island to the other, networking, gathering information, talking and talking with the farmers whose entire lives revolve around Gotland sheep.
I think I’m in love with the entire place. In many ways, it reminds me of Vermont–the strong connection to the Land, the agriculture-based community, the feeling of being a part of the natural world. But somehow it is all entirely different: the air smells like cow manure and fresh-cut hay, like Vermont, but also like the sea and like something damp and vitalizing I can’t quite place. There is a whole island mentality, too, which is new to me: the rich tourists who keep the place going aren’t flatlanders and city slickers, like they are in Vermont, but rather mainlanders. The people who don’t make their living on a tiny island in the middle of the Baltic Sea.
We are staying in a tiny, white-washed cottage on a dairy farm, surrounded by climbing roses and a tangle of flowers and apple trees in desperate need of a good pruning. As I have written before, it is very strange to find oneself on the other side of agritourism for a change–especially for my parents, I think, who are normally themselves the working farmers with the guest rooms, courting curious strangers who want to experience “country living.” In the end, though, I think they are loving it. When we arrived, the barn was full of the sounds of chore time: cows, sheep, grain in buckets and milking machines in place. “We don’t have to do ANYTHING!” my mother said. “KICK BACK!” said my father. Strange, and somehow wonderful in a Schadenfreude sort of way, to be on a farm and simultaneously to not work.
So we, the leisurely paying guests from the mainland, unpacked the rental car and grilled Baltic salmon and watched re-runs of the Big Bang Theory dubbed into Swedish. The last time my parents took a real vacation from the farm, I was ten years old.
Guest posting today is our travel companion and daughter, Emily Goodling. With camera in hand, Emily shares part of our journey to Gotland Island with you. Emily is graduate student in Mainz, Germany. When she is not studying German literature, she can be found at the theater, photographing some political protest or another, or drinking Riesling on the banks of the Rhine River. Read more about her travels at Emily Abroad or follow her blog on Facebook.
