Back in the U S of A..........

The flights from Edinburgh and London went as smooth as silk. After 9 1/2 hours of flying we are back on American soil and, as great as this trip was, we are both happy to be back (almost) home.

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So that means that this great adventure is finally over. Through each and every part of it the hand of God was clearly there to watch over us and take care of us. There was not a single time where we were in danger of missing one of our travel connections, there was not a single time where we missed out on something that we planned to do because of weather or some other circumstance, not once did either one of us have an illness or injury, all of our somewhat unusual accomodations turned out just fine, multiple times wonderful people (angels?) appeared just as needed to help us navigate around or just get our questions answered, and every experience we had exceeded anything we could have imagined when we were anticipating the trip. There is no way that our feeble efforts could make things turn out that perfectly, it can only be explained by the grace of God. So thanks for sharing our travel experiences with us. We look forward to telling even more stories to all of you in person.

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George and Kim

The long journey home begins.......

We have limited Internet bandwidth tonight so we won't be adding pictures until later (Edit: pictures added at Edinburgh airport Tues. morn). But we are finally on our 3+ day journey to get back to good old Minnesota. But we did have one last experience today before we left.

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We attended a Birthday Breakfast this morning, a few miles away from Simrishamn on a fisherman's beach on the Baltic Sea. Here is a picture of the Baltic with the morning sun reflecting off it.

It was a celebration of Petra's aunt's birthday and it is sort of a traditional gathering for much of Petra's family, including many of her first cousins and their families. Here is the guest of honor, Petra's aunt.

We ate sandwiches, pastries, brownies, and did lots and lots of visiting, as Petra's family is a talkative bunch. It was a beautiful day and much of the time was spent walking along the beach watching the kids swim in what we thought was a cold Baltic Sea.

And here is Petra's family, a fun and boisterous bunch, at least by Swedish stanadards.

After that it was time to pack up and head to the Copenhagen airport. (Here is our gate) Petra and Thomas drove us there and dropped us off in plenty of time to catch our 4:30pm flight to London. After almost 3 weeks it started to feel funny to think we are actually nearing the end of our trip and heading home.

After reaching London in about an hour and a half we caught the one hour connecting flight to Edinburgh and checked back into the hostel that we stayed in previously in Edinburgh: the one with 54 steps up a winding staircase to get to it.

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Here is a picture of the departures area at Heathrow Terminal 5.

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We are now at Burger King, using their Internet to write this blog. Tomorrow we head back to the US, spending about 10 hours on the plane to get from Edinburgh to Washington, DC.

Our last full day in Sweden.........

This is our last full day with Petra and Thomas. We will start heading for home tomorrow. But we still had some things to see today, including an ancient rock formation (it's known as a stone ship) and a real live fortress-designed castle.

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This is the outside of Petra and Thomas's summer home.

This is their living room.

Here is Petra in the kitchen.

We went to the Swedish equivalent of Stone Henge. No one knows why the stones have been placed here, but they are in the shape of a ship--but to us look more like a football.

Here are three of us at Ales Stenar (Ales Stones in English).

While we were there George decided to climb to the bottom of the cliff and touch the Baltic Sea. Going down was okay, but coming up was hard work!

We also went to Glimmingehus, a castle built and lived in in the late Middle Ages. It was surrounded by a moat and had walls about three feet thick!!

George wasn't playing by the rules at the castle and got put in the stocks--we decided to help free him so he can head back to the US tomorrow.

This is a church right next to Petra and Thomas's summer home. It is about 800 years old.

This is the altar area of the church.

We ate dinner in the barn of this building tonight. The buildings and grounds were very beautiful.

Here we are having pizza--Gunilla (Petra's mother), Thomas, Kim, George, and Petra.

One of the unusual sights in the town where Petra and Thomas have their summer home is the knitted sign post covers! Someone has an unusual sense of humor!
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So tomorrow we start heading back. It will take about 3 days and we will see some things along the way. I am not sure what we will have for Internet access on the way back. But we will blog when we can as we wrap up this magic carpet ride.

Traveling to Simrishamn.....

Today was pretty much an all day travel day, as we headed to Petra's family's summer home in Simrishamn, Sweden. Simrishamn is in the far southeast tip of Sweden and is actually just an hour's drive from Copenhagen, Denmark. In fact, at one time this area was part of Denmark.

This is a shot of the Stockholm train station. We caught the 10;21 am train for a four hour ride on the first leg of the trip. We actually sat in first class and it was very comfortable.

The train took us to Lund, Sweden, which is pictured here. From here we caught a bus, which was not as comfortable as the train, for the hour and a half ride to Simrishamn.

Lund is where Petra's daughter, Fanny, went to the university. This is a picture of a huge bike parking lot in Lund that was filled with hundreds and hundreds of bikes that belong to the university students. Apparently they just leave the bikes there during summer break and then will use them again when they return to school.

When we finally arrived in Simrishamn, after a six hour trip, it was raining and the wind was blowing, so there was no exploration today.
So we just settled in at Petra and Thomas's beautiful summer home and had a wonderful spaghetti dinner with Thomas, Bjorn and Petra (left to right, not counting Geo).

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That's pretty much today's summary. Tomorrow it is supposed to be nice enough to do some hiking and sightseeing. The end is drawing near............

Our first two full days in Stockholm, Sweden......

We have now arrived in Sweden and are staying with Petra. Thomas and Bjorn are in the southern part of Sweden and we'll head there on Saturday. Kim's the typist on this note.

This is a picture of Petra's living room. They live in a beautiful old house in Bromma, Sweden about a half hour subway ride from Stockholm.

Here is a picture of her kitchen. She renovated it when they moved in. It was a small galley kitchen with an attached maid's quarters and now it is one big space.

Had to add another George picture!

The first day we took a boat and ate lunch on an island. We had a very Swedish lunch (not!)--hamburgers and hot dogs.

Here is the sign on the island. When I take pictures I usually photograph a sign as well so I have an idea of where we've been.

After we ate lunch and got back to the mainland, we took a long walk to get back to Petra's. I had to take this picture. It could be a scene from northern MN! There is a lake in the background. It's no wonder the Swedes and Norwegians chose to settle in Minnesota--MN and Sweden look so much alike.

The second day we went to a museum all about the Vasa, a VERY fancy war ship built by King Gustavus Adolfus (the second?). On its maiden voyage it sailed for about a half an hour and sunk! It lay at the bottom of the Baltic Sea for more than 330 years. King Gustav (the somethingth) Adolph commissioned a group to bring the boat to the surface. It took about three years for the boat to make it above water and many, many hours to restore it. An interesting fact is that because the boat sunk in the Baltic Sea, the sea worms that usually eat wood weren't able to live in the water so the boat was very well preserved. This is a photo of a scale model of the way the ship looked as it got ready to sail. The acutal ship today is very dark with no paint left on it.

Here are Petra and George on one of our walking trips.

We also went to Skanson, a zoo with Swedish animals and it also had old Swedish buildings--kind of a living history museum. Each building had workers inside who would share information about what we were seeing.

This is from the Vasa. About 30 people died when the boat went under--but there were about 400 total on board. Some of the skulls have been analyzed and remarkably real heads have been created showing what the people might have looked like. You can even see the pores on the nose--really amazing!

I had to add this picture for the Volvo lovers out there (Scott, are you reading?). This one had windshield wipers on the headlights! :)

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We are now back up to date as today (Friday) was a quiet day of rest at Petra's. We slept late, ate breakfast, visited with Petra's daughter, Fanny, as she stopped by home for just a couple of hours, went for a walk to a lake, and picked up groceries on the way back for supper. At one time or another today we talked/video skyped with Casey, Wendy, Skip and Ashley in bed on Thursday night, Skip and Ashley and Link and Kora at home on Friday morning, and Mickie. It was a good day of relaxation. Tomorrow we take the train to their summer home in the south of Sweden. And then we are just a few days from starting our journey home.....

Wrapping up Scotland and on to London.......

We have had very busy days--we go from about 8:00 a.m. and finally call it a day about midnight.

We stayed in a hostel in Edinburgh that was up a spiral staircase about 50 steps--quite an interesting trip with a few suitcases. This time George and I slept in a room with 2 sets of bunks. A girl from Serbia slept in the top bunk of my bed, and a 60-plus year old man(big time snorer!) from New Jersey slept in the lower bunk of George's bed. Most of the older people we've talked to in the hostels have never stayed in one before, but they've been looking for adventure--you sure can find it in a hostel! This one didn't turn the hot water off at any time so you could get a hot shower almost any time of day.

While in Edinburgh we took a tour of the sites. This is a picture of our guide, Owen. I think he was auditioning for some part in a play...he was very dramatic while telling us about the city. This tour was free and the guides were paid by tips at the end. I think he did pretty well. He was a Canadian who came to Scotland and stayed.

This is a picture of the largest monument to a writer. Most of the monuments are for kings or other royalty but this one is for Sir Walter Scott. The buildings are all very old and quite dark--I'm guessing from years of using coal for heat (but don't quote me on that).

J.K. Rowling wrote her first Harry Potter book in the restaurant above the "furniture" part of the sign in this building. She was very poor at the time and the management would let her buy a cup of tea and sit and write all day. As she sat at the window she could see a school and the castle which are her inspirations for Harry Potter.

This is the school Rowling could see from the window. It was a school for orphans.

This is the Edinburgh Castle which could also be seen from the window by Rowling. We are going back to Edinburgh at the end of our trip to take a flight to London. I hope we get the chance to walk up to the highest point in the area to take a look around. I guess it is awesome and well worth the hike.

We saw this on part of our tour of Edinburgh. We spent quite a bit of time during the tour in a cemetery learning about different things. This was an outdoor jail cell that "The Covenenters" who were being persecuted for their religious beliefs were held in. People were kept in this cell outside during the coldest months of the year with all sorts of terrible tortuous things happening to them. The Covenant Church that we attend has its roots in Sweden--but we'll have to ask Pastor Paul when we get home if these Covenenters were the same group.

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We learned about a few sayings that we use in the US and how they came to be during this tour. One is "the graveyard shift". Dead bodies were worth a lot of money in those days because medical schools might only get one body a year to use with their students. If you had a family member who died, people took turns sleeping on the grave of their loved one for 20-30 days or long enough for the body to decompose and be worthless to others so the grave robbers wouldn't try to dig it up. Another saying, "saved by the bell" came to be because during this time they often buried people they thought had died, but really hadn't (maybe they didn't know how to check a pulse?!) so they tied a bell on a string to the "dead" person and if the person woke up, he or she could ring the bell to let people know they were still alive. That is also how the term "wake" came to be used when talking about a reviewal of a dead body. The mourners started having wakes to give the bodies time to possibly "wake up" before they were buried.

This is the most famous staute in Edinburgh. It is Greyfriars Bobby. This dog sat on the grave of his owner for 14 years until the dog finally died. Many famous dog stories were based on this dog--Lassie and Rin Tin Tin are two examples. There was some controversy about the way the statue should face and eventually the pub across the street won out on the placement. If you stand in the best spot to take the picture of the statue, the pub is in every picture--great advertising! No advertising on this blog, however! :)
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So that wraps up the trip to Scotland. Along with The Open experience, George has had his haggis, his Shepherd's Pie, and his fish and chips, so all of his itches have been scratched. Now it is on to London, arriving Monday evening and being there until Tuesday evening.

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We stayed in this bed and breakfast in central London. It was great! We shared a bathroom with other guests, but we didn't have to share our room with anyone else. We walked about 15 minutes that night to an area with lots of night life and ate Chinese! In the morning we ate a "traditional" English breakfast. It consisted of 2 pieces of toast, 2 eggs, a piece of ham, french fries and baked beans! I (Kim) could pretend that the french fries were like hash browns, but the baked beans (like the VanCamps ones) were an interesting breakfast food.

We took another bike tour in London. It was called "The Fat Tire Bike Tour". Evidently they have them in several countries in Europe. One of the families in our tour had recently been on one in Germany. We got to see all sorts of great sights.

This is a picture of Kensington Palace--it didn't really look too palatial. They were in the process of renovations and had the green wall all around it. This is where Princess Diana lived after she and Prince Charles divorced.

We got to see the last bit of the changing of the guard. Every day about noon a band plays and the guard marches.

This is Buckinham Palace. On the top of the palace there was a flag flying announcing that the Queen was home. We had hoped she might come out to say hi, but she was busy getting ready for a party that day.

The 2012 Olympics will be held in London. We made a stop during our tour at the spot that will be the site of beach volleyball. They're going to have to truck in tons of sand. Right now it's just a big open area almost like a parking lot with crushed rock on the ground.

Here is a group getting ready to head to the Queen's party. Just about every woman waiting in line on the sidewalk had a hat on. Some of the younger girls wore headbands with feathers. The men were wearing regular suits but some were wearing tails and high hats. Quite the site. We weren't invited...

This is a picture of Westminster Abbey. It cost about $15 to see inside, but every Wednesday afternoon they hold a service inside, so if you get there early enough to get a seat, you can see it for free on those days.

This is the memorial to Princess Diana. I guess it was quite controversial. Some English people thought there shouldn't be any sort of memorial to her. I thought it was quite fitting. It was a granite pool that had water flowing through it and kids were playing in it and having a good time. Many of the causes that Princess Diana championed involved children.
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And that takes care of our short time in London. From here we headed to Stockholm, Sweden, on Tuesday evening, arriving around midnight. The next blog will be about our first couple of days in Stockholm.