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.