Hello Cars collectors of the world!

The supreme blog Take Five A Day asked me to write a few lines about my blog and how collecting cars works in Sweden. They´ll run the post tonight but for all the rest of you - here is the blogpost.

And to all Take Five A Day-readers that got interested - please scroll down or click on the links to the left to read more - and Welcome All!

A typicals swedish family. But we should have been Volvo´s. Could someone tell Mattel?

I started my blogg ”Collecting Cars” almost immediately after I started to buy cars. At first it was just a good way to display and keep orders of my cars, since I hide them in a closed cabinet in the garage. I don´t wan´t my two sons (2 and 4 years old) to see it.

The madness in that.

But I guess some people reading Take Five A Day could relate?

(And the kids got their own collection. Rather small ones, but hey, they´re not making money for themselves yet!)

But why start to collect childrens toys just to hide them from children? The answer was, as my collection expanded, suddenly clear to me. It was a way to create a part of my life where I still had control.

Me and my wife had some issues with our second son V. We were quite worried about several things and after almost a year we did a magnetic brain scan. It turned out he lacks myelin in his brain. Whiter matter. It means that his brain works much slower than normal brains do and it effects his development over all.

This was of course very bad news and it made med feel sad and distressed. But my new hobby gave my a chance to forget and breathe.

Now my blog is in english, I see that I have som readers outside Sweden and most of the collectors are in the US and I want you to be able to read my thoughts. I´ve also decieded to go public with my life and thoughts, being a dad to a son with a brain disease.

It´s in many ways a different life, but at the same time, it´s all the same. And the collection of cars is getting larger and larger for every month.

But it´s harder and more expensive in Sweden, I got some photos for you Americans, just to show you how lucky you are!

This is how an awerage toy store in Stockholm display cars. We have more or less monopoly in Sweden, there´s two major toy stores (BR and Toy´s R US) but they have the same owners so this is how almost every toy store in Sweden looks like. 

As you could see we have a huge surplus of Petrov Trunkov over here. Go visisti Sweden this summer and buy your own Petrov – a vacation you´l never forget!

This is a bargain. A two-pack for 100 Swedish crowns. Something like 14 USD. That´s what we nomrally pay for ONE car.

This 4-pack costs 379 SEK – 53 USD. But I got ´em already…

I buy most of my cars on the internet. We have a swedish version of E-bay called Tradera.com and there I use to pay like 75 SEK – 10,50 USD for a Rubber Tire Cars2 racer, including shipping.

But recently a new thing – yes it´s really quite a new thing – happened. In a subway station close to my - job a flower shop (!) started to sell cars.

A perfect mix. Flowers to my wife – cars to me!

The store has all kinds of cars, even the ones from the early series of Cars 1.

So I guess it´s not entirely true that this 4 pack is only available at Walmart?  (A store that doesn´t exist in Sweden, of course)

Just look at the beauty of this picture.  Jay in a perfect surrounding of orchids. Nothing strange at all about it.