New Year's wanderlust

I had a pretty unusual New Year's Day (happy one to you all, by the way!).
I left town on the ' eve together with a gang of seven people and we all drove up to Alboga, a tiny little barely-a-village situated between five fields and a forest in the 'inland' part of Sweden, where Dannyboy's parents have a 'Torp' (a cottage). Not the middle of nowhere, but practically next door. There was a church on the hill, though. The surrounding forests were dark, beautiful and very Narnian, especially when the first snow I've seen all year started to powder the landscape. We took a lot of walks and a lot of pictures.

The New Year's Eve celebration was as fantastic as it gets when you crowd eight happy people together in a small space and they cook dinner together under the influence of white wine (the theme: moules, fish, white wine, white wine, sorbet, too many cranberries and another white wine). At the stroke of 12 it became clear that we were far away enough from civilization to see only little flashes of lights along the forest horizon, instead of fireworks. However we did have some bubbly to toast with. Afterwards we, uh, kept going. Do I even need to say that it got late?

My problem is that I've discovered that my caffeine tolerance has dwindled to practically xero, and I'd had a few towards bedtime at 03:45 (coffees, to be clear...). I couldn't sleep so well, and gave up totally at 08:30 and sneaked out of the house for a long walk.

Alboga's residents stayed in hiding most of the time we were there; the only other life forms we saw were one neighbours' dog and the other neighbour's cat (who apparently thought it was a raven - at least it sounded like one. It was cawing incessantly.). I walked up to the churchyard and looked at the tombstones, and then I followed some brutal tractor tracks in a field... they led me to a local bog, which was also beautiful like something out of a cautionary childrens' tale...

It's a weird and wonderful feeling to spend New Year's morning tramping around a countryside so quiet that if you stop, there is no sound at all. In the end stopping almost freaked me out because the absence of sound was so massive (which is ironic, considering my enthusiasm in my last post...). Even breathing started to feel like an offence. (But on the other hand I was a bit queasy from non-recovery since the previous evening).
So with a hum consisting of strands of various melodies, I tramped back along the tracks, breaking the silence and moving onward to a day of moving very slowly and going home.