By Tamara Hardingham-Gill, CNN
(CNN) — There are few things Arabella Carey Adolfsson enjoys more than going fishing near her lakeside home in Sweden during the summertime, or getting her camera out and taking photographs of the natural beauty surrounding her.
She and her husband Stefan, a Swede, often take their boat out from Torpön, the island where they live, onto the waters of Lake Sommen, savoring the picturesque views of the surrounding fields, forests and cliffs.
“It’s gorgeous here,” Adolfsson, who was born and raised in San Diego, tells CNN Travel. “Sweden is beautiful. The lake is beautiful. The air is clean. There’s no traffic.”
Since moving to Scandinavia in 2022, after spending much of her life in California, she’s come to appreciate the rhythm of having four distinct seasons — though Swedish winters, she admits, “can be quite brutal.”
Serendipitious moment
There are other pleasures too. Adolfsson says she enjoys being close to the rest of Europe. The couple sometimes drive to Copenhagen and then fly to Portugal, or drive to Stockholm, four hours away, where they can “jump on a plane to Latvia or Hungary.”
And yet, nearly three years into the move, Adolfsson says that settling into life in Sweden has come at a cost she hadn’t fully anticipated.
She and her husband, who met and married in 2009, had long imagined splitting their time between Sweden, Mexico and California. Stefan and Adolfsson who is Mexican American, have three children and three grandchildren between them.
They first tried living in Sweden together in 2016, moving to the southern city of Lund, near Malmö, but after two and a half years Adolfsson returned to the United States, homesick.
They decided to try again after what she describes as a serendipitous moment in August 2022, when she came across an online listing for a “beautiful” furnished lakeside house on Torpön. Within a month, they had bought the property and by October, they had moved in.
Only after arriving in Torpön did Adolfsson realize that their new home was “in the middle of nowhere.” The island, small and sparsely populated, is at least half an hour drive to what she calls “civilization.”
Despite having lived in Sweden before, moving to such a remote part of the country proved to be a culture shock for Adolfsson. Days can pass without her seeing anyone other than her husband.
“I’m very much a person who loves people and gets my energy from being around people,” she said. On Torpön, she added, residents tend to keep to themselves. Making friends has been difficult.
Back in San Diego, Adolfsson was surrounded by her large extended family. The absence of that community has been one of the hardest adjustments for her.
“There was a huge slice of my life that was taken away,” she says. “And I still haven’t figured out what to replace it with.” She is, however, grateful that her sister lives in Germany, which is in the same time zone as Sweden.
Mental reset
She recognizes that life might feel different in a city, rather than on an island with no public transportation and a single restaurant.
Torpön hums with activity in the summer — kayaking, paddleboarding, boating — but winters are long and quiet, the island more or less deserted.
Adolfsson and Stefan, who works as a substitute teacher, plan their grocery shopping trips to the mainland carefully, stocking up before retreati