Nordpolen

Back in Skara again we got busy catching up with friends also back in the area to visit their parents for the summer. One day we drove to Vara to meet up with two old school friends of mine, Karin and Carin. Carin normally lives in Rome and our summer schedules rarely match up, but now we've been lucky two years in a row to manage to fit each other in. Yay!

We decided to meet at the classic café 'Nordpolen' (dating back to 1903!), for lunch.

The name 'Nordpolen' (=North Pole) comes from a man called Andrée. He was an 19th century explorer and one of his big passions was to fly hot air balloons. During one of his test flights in 1894, he flew from Göteborg and landed on a field close to Vara, and the story goes that Andrée and his crew came to socialise with the people of the town that night.
Three years later he started his dire trip towards his dream goal the North Pole. Unfortunately he never made it, having to do an emergency landing on the ice of Vitön (his remains wasn't found until 1930). The founders of Nordpolen heard about Andrées visit to Vara, and since he was still missing in 1903 when they started up, they decided to name the café in honour of him.

We also went to the park to let the kids blow off some steam, but we got disappointed to see they had replaced the really cool kids playground with this... red... straight lined... strange... thing? Not as much fun.

We managed to take a photo of ourselves, in the only rays of sunshine we saw that day!