Return journeys - when one place is enough

I love traveling and seeing new places. It's an adventure to get off a plane or a train or out of your car, and look around to explore a place where you've never been.

This photo was taken at midnight, in July.

But there are also places that you just love to return to. Places where you feel at home, or happy, or just plain good. My parents' summer house in northern Sweden is one of those places for me.

May.

It's a beautiful place on the Bay of Bothnia. It has its own small beach and you can swim in the water, which is brackish rather than salty. There are neighbors along the shoreline, but it's still private and secluded.

The kids love it because they get to go swimming and fishing, they can play in the sand, pick blueberries in the woods, find frogs in the pond and see the hare grazing in the morning.

In the winter, the place is not as inviting perhaps, but it's still beautiful in it's own way.

Much of northern Sweden is like that in the winter months: foreboding, dark, often cold, and with a sense that nature has shut down operations until the sun returns.

And when the sun eventually does come back, so do the kids. They're already asking about when it's time to go there again.

So many places to go in the world, so many destinations to see and experience, yet some places are good enough to revisit again and again.