Landed

After a long sequence of flights across surprisingly little salt water, we are comfortably settled in our hotel in Goteborg, a nice, smallish Swedish city that seems to have thousands of tall, blonde women. My computer says that it is 11am (in Portland), but my watch says that it is 8pm. Despite having slept a good bit on all three flights, my body agrees with the watch. Suzanne, who does not sleep well on planes, has just crashed on her side of the bed!

Noel and Marty were kind enough to take us (and our two backpacks, two carry-ons, and three giant suitcases) to the airport in the morning. Then Noel took a series of comedic pictures of us trying to figure out how to get them all into the counter; the one at left is the least unflattering. We made it, and all of the bags were comfortably under the weight and size limit. (Suzanne has a habit of buying stuff that seems to me to be useless but actually comes in handy once in a while: a suitcase scale!)

The flight to San Francisco was quick and uneventful, apart from the family a couple of rows behind us with about 6 children ranging in age from "scream" to "squeal." That was just the preamble anyway. The main event was the long flight from SFO to Copenhagen. I was amazed (and Suzanne was pleased) that our route was almost entirely over land! I find it easy to forget about the "Great Circle" routes about which Mr. Mead duly informed me in 8th grade geography. From San Francisco we headed northeast, cutting the corner of Oregon before heading across Idaho, Montana, and West-Central Canada, north of Hudson Bay, and out over Greenland, Iceland, Scotland, and into Denmark. Compared to our recent trip from SFO to New Zealand (which was 99% over water), this was almost like a land trip with occasional ferry crossings! We arrived in Copenhagen at about 1pm local time (4am in Portland) and then hopped across to Goteborg, arriving here at 4:30. The Volvo driver was right on time and whisked us downtown to the Radisson hotel.

This is the week of the annual culture festival in Goteborg, so the town is hopping. There are music venues in the many parks and the restaurants are packed. In our present state of exhaustion we cannot really appreciate all the excitement as much as we might at another time---maybe tomorrow. We are being taken to Volvo at 11am tomorrow to pick up our new car. We are already arguing about the name. I proposed Bjorn, but she seems to think that it's a female. We'll see...

This part of Sweden reminds me very much of Oregon and Minnesota. Oregon because it is heavily forested and very, very green (although I know that Portland is not very green this time of year) and Minnesota because it has so many lakes. Flying into Goteborg was like flying into a forest full of lakes! Beautiful place with which one could easily fall in love.

That's all for now.  I'll try to post a couple of pictures of us and Bjorn (or Sonja or Whomever) tomorrow.