The tulips in bloom outside our front door. Photos by Robert Corkery.

“Did you appreciate the onset of summer in Cincinnati as much as what you do now,” Robert asked me yesterday.

“Of course, I’ve always loved summer,” I replied somewhat defensively, as if he was somehow implying that summer was better here in Stockholm. “It reminds me of long and warm sunny days and the ending of school.”

But in spite of my answer, I kept thinking about the question. And today I do have to admit: I appreciate summer more now. Hot summer days as I knew them growing up are more rare here. Yesterday was lovely and warm, today is back to being gray and cool. And as I mentioned, yesterday was the warmest day we have had this year. But it still has not been all that warm. So I’ve learned to appreciate those small does of spring and summer whenever I get them.

When I started writing my book, I really did not have much of an idea of what it would entail. You would think that after working as an editor and writer for 20 years, I would have been more informed. And I was, to a degree. I had already been writing every day and spending a lot of time editing other writers. And thanks to working on deadline for all those years, I was also good at staying disciplined and at the computer.

But the actual day to day of writing a book is hard, much harder than I would have imagined. It’s a cerebral process and I often feel like my brain hurts at the end of the day. As I am writing a memoir, I spend a lot of time not only describing what the landscape around me looked like, but also figuring out where my head was at a particular moment in time: how did I feel, what was I thinking when that lion jumped on the buffalo right next to my jeep on a South African safari. (For the record, I cringed, buried my head on Robert’s shoulder and then looked again, much as you do when you pass by the scene of a horrible car crash.) Plumbing my memories and diaries for why I felt so compelled to live abroad, for the layers of reasoning behind quitting my perfect job and why I continue to feel the need to travel is actually like going through analysis. I know the resulting book will be worth it, but for right now, the process is hard.

A boat on Lake Mälaren last week. This time of year gets me thinking about boat trips on Stockholm's archipelago.

I am not sure exactly where my desire to live abroad and travel came from. My family vacations growing up were usually to Michigan – one state north of Ohio – and were fishing trips with an extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. They were a lot of fun, but they certainly were not what you would call taking a grand tour.

Mostly, I blame my desire to travel more extensively on reading Jane Austen, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Their tales of jaunts in Britain, France and Spain spoiled me, making me want to go to these places as well. The bulk of my travels started after college and I have had the chance to travel to some exciting and interesting places around the globe, especially after moving to Europe. Luckily for me, Robert is a traveler too and travel is where a good portion of our income goes to. Now we just need to work out where to go next.

Brightly colored bath houses at Brighton Beach in Melbourne. (How's that for some beaching alliteration?)

In Melbourne, I went to a dinner where a travel writer was speaking. The woman who greeted me at the door was another travel writer named Ali. In chatting, we discovered that she had written two articles for the in-flight magazine I used to work for while I was still the editor. Going futher still, it turns out she was a friend of Evan who wrote a monthly Travel department for me. They had both lived in Prague, which is where I met Evan.

Going one step further, the travel writer who was speaking was named Mark Dapin. He had just returned from a trip to Stockholm where he had interviewed Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s sambo, father and brother for an article.

It is such a small world. Sometimes, you don’t even need six degrees of separation to make a connection with someone thousands of miles from home.

On Saturday, Robert and I went to the beach and then to lunch at the prison. But it’s not quite what you might expect. We were hiking around Långholmen, an island in the center of Stockholm that lies between Södermalm and Kungsholmen. First we stopped at the beach where we have picnicked and swam many times during the summer. But we could not have swam if we wanted to as the lake is frozen over. And the beach is nowhere to be found, buried as it is under about two feet of snow. So instead we walked out across the ice for a while and watched the skaters on the other side of Mälaren from us.

When I got too cold to hike any further, we made our way back to the prison. The Kronohäktet or Crown Remand prison was built on Långholmen in 1874 and was used until 1975 – Swedish writer Jan Guillou even served part of a sentence for espionage there. Now the prison is a hostel where you can sleep in a cell. Connected to it is the Finkan Pub – it turned out to be a cozy place to stop for a wine by the fire. And the goulash  soup was excellent. Not a bad day of exploration.

Crocodiles: yet another thing that will kill you.

For my book, I have been writing one of the chapters on Australia lately. It’s been a good escape to “travel” down under to write about my many trips there, especially since Stockholm seems to be eternally gray and snowy these days.

A big memory of my first trip was continually hearing, “watch out, that will kill you.” From snakes and spiders to sharks,  jellyfish and crocodiles, Australia seems to have an inordinate number of things that are in the world’s most deadly category. When we went hiking, I had to look out for brown snakes. When we swam, I had to watch out for box jellyfish and sharks. And depending on where we were, crocs were a problem too. I had to look out for brown spiders even while just hanging out at Uncle Peter’s place.

It made me feel quite jumpy as the trip went on, but I noticed that Robert and all his Aussie mates were pretty casual about all those killers. And the next time I traveled down under, I also became rather inexplicably casual. During my last trip – my seventh – we went swimming at Bondi Beach the day after a shark bit off someone’s arm.  I’m not sure if I had adapted to my surroundings or just gone mad.