1 January 2020: It seems so strange to type 2020, but here we go! There is not much to report for today. We slept late, but not as late as we should have. We all had a delicious New Year’s Day breakfast thanks to David’s good cooking, then at least two of the kids crawled back into bed. We straightened up a bit and did some pre-packing prior to meeting up with our dear friend, Anders, for our dinner reservation at Pelikan.
We were careful not to stay up too late that evening, given that we needed to be up and out the door early the next morning for our flight back to the U.S. We had no trouble getting up, packing, cleaning, and being on time. The first miracle of the new year!
We also had no trouble getting to the airport, but once there we ran into all sorts of things that do not normally cause us any trouble. Security lines were impossibly long, passport control was unusually pokey and unkind, and we ended up in the wrong gate area. We had simply headed to where we normally go, but our flight was leaving out of a completely different gate on the other side of the terminal. We had to exit security and passport control and go back through. Happily, we were able to do that in a reasonable amount of time so that we arrived to the gate without any further trouble. Plus, we did not have to toss out the dumplings and noodles that Isaac and Thomas had ordered just prior to our realizing that we were in the wrong spot. They were VERY happy about that!
The rest of the trip home was okay. The kids and I had a short connection time in Chicago and our flight from Stockholm landed late, but we made it to the next plane (no thanks to the incredibly rude TSA fellow!) and got home before 6:00pm local time. Our whole trip was just under 16 1/2 hours, door to door. Pretty amazing. David flew on to his conference in San Diego, to return home the beginning of the next week. We are all looking forward to being in Stockholm together again in the spring. Perhaps we will have more snow then?
