Not really, I just always wanted to say that.  We did go on a tour of sorts though.  A church tour.   Well if you call two churches in the same day a tour, which I just did.

I think I mentioned before, but if I didn’t, the reason for this trip to Scandinavia was to celebrate Bonnie & Kent’s 50th wedding anniversary.  Woot woot.  And one thing that Kent really wanted to do was to go to Bottnaryd to see the church where his grandfather was baptized.

The Bottnaryd Kyrka (oh, that word there with the ky, that’s pronounced shirka.  no, I am not kidding!) was built in 1666, completed in 1667, but there was no money to decorate the church until 1693 when they hired Anders Falk to paint the inside walls and ceilings.

There was a medieval wooden church on the property until it was destroyed in 1666 and replaced by the current church.

But the baptismal font is medieval.  Dave’s great-grandfather AEJ, later AEP, was baptized here in 1870.  He wanted to go into the ministry and left in 1888 for America.  He was invited back in 1929 to preach at his childhood church.

When Kent retired it ended something like 165 years (or 115, it depends on who you ask on what day) of a Palmquist at the pulpit!  That’s an awful lot of “Can I get an Amen?!”

 

The bell towers are kept separate from the church in their own structures.  I am not sure why they were designed this way, but both churches on our tour featured this style.

The other church on our tour was the historic painted church in Habo.  I don’t have any information about this one, but the photos (above and below) show that it was really something to look at.  It was neat to experience Kent’s return to the Bottnaryd church.  It did make me want to explore my family history a bit more.  That is something my mom and I were doing on Ancestry.com before she had her stroke.  I don’t think she got too far, but maybe someday I will try to pick it up again and see what I can find.