♫ Ya live sixteen years, and whaddaya get? ♫
Answer: You get to go back to Sweden!
So, to get you up to speed since the last post, we've got married, had a couple of kids, and planned a return trip to Sweden. Unfortunately, that trip was planned for Xmas 2020 and so got cancelled like everything else. But after keeping our heads down for 4 years we're giving it another go.
We're loading up a couple of t[w]eenagers and Granny and doing a quick five-person, five-week voyage through Copenhagen, Malmo, Orebro, Stockholm, Helsinki and Rovaniemi, including a week and a half in Orebro to spend Jul with Emma's Uncle and Aunt and cousins, and to introduce the kids to their Svensk rellies.
Some added complications since our last trip are, of course, the kids. We certainly love'em (and they're a big reason we're doing the trip), but they do make the logistics that much harder. Throw in a full palette of food allergies on one hand, and some teen anxiety on the other and we're in for an interesting ride.
The pachydemic in the corner is of course COVID. I know we had our Mission Accomplished parade back in 2022-ish where we collectively decided it was all too hard and unlikely to succeed so how about we all just declare victory and act like nothing happened (aside from some never-waste-a-good-crisis profiteering from the big end of town) [see also: Climate Change]. But a risk that's hidden is a risk that's hard to mitigate and, while we don't want to get COVID for lots of reasons including alarmingly non-zero long term risks of serious incapacity (and probably some sort of cancer risk that we'll only find out about in 20 years) from a multi-systemic vascular disease dressed up as a respiritory disease that we've perversely convinced ourselves is also not spread by <checks notes> breathing, we also don't want to waste time being sick while we're spending thousands of dollars a day to enjoy ourselves and experience as much scenery and culture as possible. Anyway, at the risk of upsetting those who think about such things, and spoinking the cognitive dissidents, suffice to say it'll be a tough needle to thread.
I've decided to resurrect the old blog from 2008 because a) some nice continuity, b) it still works, and/but c) it's delightfully old school and I'm not even sure the backend is still maintained.
I'm writing this in Copenhagen at 4am because of jet-lead (the opposite of jet-lag), and I really should be writing about the trip here, but I wanted to set the scene first.
Välkomna!
