Welcome to my travel blog which apparently is what this blog is ending up being. I should be blogging more frequently than every trip to Sweden. Our last trip was in 2009! Maybe someone should remind me to blog every time I go on vacation. This is 3 out of 5 trips I am planning on taking this year alone!
Anyway, we have arrived at our final destination in Sweden at last and we had quite the adventure getting here. It all started on Friday July 1st when we got to SeaTac airport and found out our flight had been delayed over 2 hours due to some "technical issue". This meant that our connecting flight in Iceland would be missed and there was not another flight out until the following day. Good times huh? Our choices were to go back home and spend the night and come back to SeaTac the next day. Same time. Same bat channel. Or we could get a hotel room on the airline and spend the night in Iceland. We would have had to call my dad to come pick us up at the airport and either drive home (with no food in the house) and hope he would be available the same time the next day to take us back again or just deal with the delay and move forward. I chose the latter. Why not?
Well, the flight out of Seattle was fairly uneventful even if we did leave about 2.5 hours later than planned. The kids managed to sleep a little on the flight as we had some extra seats for them to lay down on. However, Davin had troubles with his ears on the decent and he had a full on fit about refusing to do anything to help unplug his ears. So, you can thank us for having a screaming almost 7 year old on the plane.
We arrived about 2am Seattle time in Keflavík, Iceland and it took FOREVER to get our hotel rooms. I don't know why they couldn't have notified the airport when we left SeaTac that a bunch of people would be arriving and needing hotels? I mean really people! We had no idea where to go or who to talk to when we arrived. Did we go through customs as if we were connecting as usual or go through customs as if our final destination was Iceland? It was the latter. Then we had to figure out who to talk to on the other side which was difficult since it was still early in the morning Icelandic time and most things were not fully staffed yet. Once we did find someone they were clueless so they had to find someone else to help out. Then once things started going we were in the back of the line and waited another hour or so to get a hotel assigned. By that time they told us they could put us in a "triple" room and add an extra bed. Sounded great and by this time we are so tired I just accepted it without asking any questions like how far away is the hotel and how do we get there? Big mistake.
They directed us to a bus outside which of course several buses were waiting and we again had to ask the drivers ... is this our bus? By this time most of the group had already left so it was our family, a young guy with an accordion and an older guy who didn't talk much. We do finally find the right bus and once we are on we almost all fall asleep. Fredrik stayed awake and said the ride was about 40 minutes. So, we finally get to the hotel and find out there are no "triple" occupancy rooms but we could get two rooms right next to each other. Not connected together. Sure. Whatever. It is now after 6am our time and we had been awake for about 20 hours and didn't care.
They were about ready to close the restaurant for lunch so we took the free lunch before we collapsed into bed. It was an odd lunch to say the least. It was fancy Scandinavian food which I was not in the mood for but I made do. Fredrik and I picked the most "breakfast" looking item on the menu and a burger for the kids to share. Neither kid liked their fancy plain burger and our smoked salmon with egg and spinach over toast was just okay for me. Fredrik liked it better. For me it was way too salty and the egg and fish were not cooked enough for me. At least the fancy salad I had was pretty good so I ate most of that. I wish I had taken photos because the food was actually really pretty. Our waiter was a doll and bent over backwards to take care of us. Now I wish I was awake enough to have left a tip. Maybe I can call the hotel later and ask since we also left without checking out too!
Anyway, we went up to our rooms and promptly fell asleep. It felt so good to be in a bed at last!
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