New Trip September 15, 2010

Wednesday September 15 – Thursday September 16, 2010

We’re Off

We’re underway with what we assume will be our last huge, foreign, driving, exploring, getting lost trip. This one is taking us to the Northern Capitals of Europe including Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Brussels followed by a couple months driving through France, Spain and Portugal.

We did the final packing and worrying on Tuesday morning and left the lake right after lunch to spend the night with Mary’s Brother Paul and wife Lynn and join John, Joann and Bill for dinner. (Blue Heron – pretty good!) John has volunteered to baby sit our car while we are gone and we are delivering important secret documents to Bill’s son Patrick in Copenhagen. We swapped identical brief cases at the restaurant.

John K. drove us to the airport on a rainy Wednesday morning to give us our two hours to get checked in and through security. Of course it took ten minutes to do that so Mary had plenty of time to get medicated. And, here’s the headline: When asked what she would like to drink before takeoff, Mary replied, "Just a decaf." Who are you and what did you do with my wife? Really! She did grab a quick martini as soon as we were on the plane to Chicago.

Our flights were perfect, as in undramatic. We were traveling on American in business class (on miles of course) so we got into the club for our 4-hour layover in Chicago where we had a bad pannini sandwich and a Bloody Mary. We decided that even if we were really frequent travelers, we would still not join the American club. It is just a quiet place where they take one more shot at squeezing a few more dollars from their customers.

Our next leg was on Iberia Airline (an American partner) to Madrid on an overnight flight. The front of the plane is really very nice for these trips. Our very wide seats had about 20 different controls to get us reclining for relaxing and almost horizontal for snoozing. There was a choice of ten different movies to watch on our personal TVs along with an assortment of sit-coms and many music channels. We did get our martinis, some Spanish red wine, good chow (John Veal Ragout and Mary Vegetable Lasagna) and a little after dinner Brandy with our desserts. These round trip tickets retail for about $7,000 apiece so there is no greater benefit to using a credit card to pay for everything than using the miles for this.

When we got to Madrid we had a 26 mile run through the airport to get to passport control, followed by a 110 mile train ride to terminals HJK, and finishing with a 2 mile swim through crowds and up escalators to the Iberia Business Class Club—the perfect airport triathlon. The Madrid airport is a monster with terminals spaced around the property like Atlanta. We did a bit of shopping in duty free, followed by a relaxing two-hour layover. We chatted with some folks and kept pressing "one" for English, but all the "numbers" turned out to be Spanish.

Our next flight to Stockholm was once again on-time with a 10:20 departure and a 2:20 arrival (7:20 back home so about 24 hours on the road so far). Traveling within the EU is certainly easy these days with no passport checks and in this case no luggage check. We were able to purchase "Stockholm Cards" to get us onto all the public transportation and into most of the museums and attractions for the next couple days, and hit the ATM for a few thousand Kroners. We were advised to interview Taxi drivers and never pay more than 550SK for our trip to our lodging in Soderholm. The first guy with a Mercedes quoted us 495SK so it was a done deal right away.

Little did we know that the Mercedes Guy was a frustrated NASCAR driver. We were told that the trip from the airport would take about an hour but perhaps a little longer during late afternoon—we were there in 40 minutes with many minutes spent in a traffic snarl. Rick Steves said, "Only a Swedish Meatball would drive in Stockholm" and we found ours. He was hitting 140KPH (about 90MPH) on the airport highway and we were making lane changes with inches to spare at all speeds. Phew!

Our studio apartment in Soderholm, a residential and "in" area just south of the old city (similar to Uptown in Mpls), is a bedroom/sitting room, small kitchen and bathroom that had a former life as a small closet. How small is it? John has to decide between number one and number two so he knows which way to face when he goes through the door. Mary has to go out the door to change her mind. The apartment is an IKEA display moved into the city with teak floors and whitewashed walls. Very Swedish which is exactly what we were looking for. Our hostess Elizabeth is really Swiss, but nice in spite of that. The apartment is on the fourth floor with no elevator so we were huffing and puffing lugging our two-month’s worth of supplies up the stairs.

There is a little fold down stool on each floor landing for the elderly or out-of-shape to catch their breath. Thank you King Olaf.

A quick nap, shower and we are ready to go again by 6:00 PM local time. We did a mile walk around our neighborhood checking out the local restaurants (3 per block) and watering holes (4 per block) as well as some grocery stores and bakery windows. The area is dynamite with tons of young folks and a few like us wandering the streets and having fun. We pop into a non-descript, unbusy restaurant on Skanegaten for a bottle of South African Red Wine and fish with white mushroom sauce and steamed potatoes for Mary, and Swedish beef with a brown sauce with mushrooms and diced potatoes for John. Our waiter was from Chile and had worked for SAS Airlines for some time and decided to settle here. He said we should go to Santiago and we said he should go to New York where he has a friend. American cross culture exchanges in Sweden.
A leisurely walk home to bed.

It's only 4:00 PM back home but for some reason we think we will sleep well on our clean-lined Swedish queen bed with ultra-modern silver lamps, stylishly shaped throw rugs over the teak floors, and piles of naturally matched throw pillows. OK, just go to IKEA to see where were sleeping.