On the road

I have really only travelled in Sweden as an adult and then mostly for business, so while I am reasonably familiar with the university cities (many as they have become in later years), the rest of the country is unfamiliar to me.

So when the Stråhles offered a bus trip to the modelling exhibition Grevens Glue Galore in Motala, I eagerly tagged on. It took some hours to get there, but in these degenerate times, there are no longer any trains to Motala, and anyway, Mats and Lisa did their utmost to keep us passengers entertained. Well, we entertained ourselves as well - I and Lars B had a long discussion where we realised we had really no idea about the early history of Liberia. (When I later looked it up in Wikipedia, it was rather sketchily described, but I got the impression that it was as much colonisation and oppression of the indigenous peoples as what was performed by European nations.)

Anyway, once in Motala, we realised Vätternfestivalen was in full swing, with the currently noisiest activity being speed boat races in the bay, covering the harbour with the distinct smell of nitromethane. I must say, I find racing boats rather unæasthetic:


I tried lunch at the Motor museum, which was not very exciting, foodwise. The museum itself was rather more interesting. It is not restricted to cars but is as much a nostalgia museum, with old film cameras, hundreds of old radio sets, chain saws and whatnot. Even I got reason to get teary-eyed at the sight of a perfectly preserved ABC 80, complete with audio cassette secondary storage:

Yep, once upon a time Motala was the centre of a thriving Swedish computer industry. That was in the days when you could actually fit a useful program into 16 kiB.

Then back to Folkets Hus, where close to 400 models had been exhibited, most of them cars, which tend to leave me cold. There were some very nice aircraft though, including a very stripy Cessna in 1/72:


At the swap meet I wandered around chatting with sellers and aquaintances and somehow acquired, quite without intention, some very necessary tools and nice models.

Eventually it was time for handing out the prizes and I realised the friendly little man with the "Claes" name badge was the eponymous "Count". (He's really a baron, I think quite a few people have to die first for him to get the comital title.)

Many of the usual suspects won prizes and then it was time to carefully pack all the models for the transport back. I and Lars spent the way back discussing what British aircraft would have been used in Vietnam in an alternate reality. We decided the Buccaneer would have replaced the Skyhawk and dreaming on, went on to posit the development of a four-seat, body-widened Bucc for electronic intelligence and similar purposes, replacing the Prowler.

And then we got home.