Now that we’ve been home a few days I feel mostly recovered from the trip and I can start to write a little about it. Honestly, though, there wasn’t much to recover from besides lack of sleep — the whole thing went surprisingly well, far better than I could have hoped. I didn’t exactly think it would be bad, but we were traveling with five kids — including one teenager and one infant — and we were moving around a lot, overnighting in five different establishments over the course of nine nights. There were long train rides and bus rides and long, long walks in the scorching sun, the gusting wind, and the pouring-down rain. There was plenty of potential for things to go wrong, but amazingly, not much did, and we handled the little that did with admirable aplomb, if I do say so myself.

We left home the morning of Monday the 27th and took the one-hour flight to Stockholm. We got settled in at our hotel around lunch-time, then spent the day not doing much in particular. We did some shopping, took the kids to the park, ate at both McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, and mostly just tried to stay cool in the intense heat. Tuesday was our appointment at the U.S. Embassy to register the younger kids’ citizenship and to renew Lydia’s passport. It was another hot day, so sitting in the non-air-conditioned waiting room for two or so hours while everything got taken care of wasn’t much fun for anybody, but I had all my paperwork (minus a copy of my college transcript) together, so it was a pretty straight-forward process. Also, they had A&W root beer in the pop machine, so that was something.

Wednesday was a day I’d been looking forward to for months — we met up with my wonderful, wonderful friend, Leslie, and her son, Alex — two people I’ve seen far too little of in recent years. We used to meet up weekly, at least, when we all lived in Stockholm, but since we moved up north and they moved back to Texas, we don’t get together often at all. We spent the Wednesday at Skansen, where the kids got to run around and be free, and Les and I got to chat and catch up some. I don’t know what was the matter with me, but I didn’t come away from the day with a single picture other than the family shot Leslie took of me and Olof and the kids. If this were CSI, you could probably zoom in on Lydia’s sunglasses and extract an image of Leslie that you could enhance to a clear, sharp picture of her beautiful face, but alas, in real life you’ll have to settle for this better-of-some-than-others photo.