Coming Home

We left our apartment in Uppsala early Monday morning with heavy bags and heavy hearts. We had so much fun there and met so many interesting people that coming back to suburban American seemed a little... I don't know, routine? However, family and friends are at home so I'm pretty sure we can adjust.

We had decided to take a cab to the airport for simplicity's sake and our taxi was scheduled to meet us at our apartment building at 7:00AM. However, it turned out the taxi company apparently declined to listen to our directions and went so far as to ignore the address we had given and assumed we were at a hotel down the street. The mixup was resolved over the phone and we got into a cab after only a minor delay. The cabbie was the least friendly person we came across in our time in Sweden but maybe the fact that it was 7:00AM had something to do with it.

We arrived at Stockholm's airport, Arlanda, told the driver we needed to checkin with KLM, and he dropped us off at terminal 5. We thanked him and humped our baggage into the terminal, only to find no sign of a KLM checkin counter. The people at Information told us that KLM was actually in terminal 2, at least a 15 minute walk away. So, loaded down with heavy backpacks and dragging heavier suitcases behind us, we made the hike through the teeming crowds to terminal 2 where we checked our baggage and, feeling about 100 lbs lighter, we found our gate.

As usual in Sweden, where trains leave the station at their scheduled times to the minute, our KLM flight, scheduled to depart at 9:25 pushed back from the gate at, yes, 9:25. Amazing and nearly unheard of in the U.S.

We flew into Amsterdam and, with clocklike precision, arrived on time, showed our passports to a friendly Dutchman, and found our gate without any problems. Our Delta flight (CJ's grant only allows flights on U.S. carriers or their partners, e.g. KLM) boarded on time but, after everyone was settled on board, the flight crew announced that there was a problem which would delay our departure.

It seems that the FAA is allowing U.S. airlines to transition to digital flight manuals in the cockpit but currently they are required to have hard copies on the flight deck in addition to digital. The flight crew had to contact headquarters in Atlanta (nothing good can come of that!) to seek permission to fly with some subsections of the flight manual available to them in digital form only. Someone had incompetently left those sections in some unknown location not on the airplane. Naturally, permission was denied (what can you expect from Atlanta?) so the next announcement was to the effect that the offending sections would be printed locally and delivered to the aircraft post haste. In this case, post haste was 20 to 30 minutes. After an hour sitting on the ground fully loaded, we finally pushed back from the gate. Then we sat there for another 10 to 15 minutes while, apparently, the pilots were asking directions to Seattle (I'm just guessing here). Eventually, we really did commence our 9.5 hour flight, now extended to nearly 11 hours of airplane seat sitting.

American corporations are the envy of the world, am I right?

Along the way we had some spectacular views of Greenland and Baffin Bay:

Mountains in southern Greenland

Pack ice off the coast of Canada's Baffin Island. Clouds are in the upper left corner.

Nothing else particularly photogenic appeared, at least through the airplane window, until we reached our own fair city:

Seattle Center! 

Downtown!

 The final insult was our half hour wait for our Shuttle Express ride. Obviously, they had to wait for enough riders for a profitable trip, right? And capitalism, the more pure the better, is always best, right?

Tell it to the Swedes.