Sweden & Denmark Trip (Day 1)

Alright, I figured the easiest way for me to write about our trip was to do it by the day instead of doing just one long post. I ended up including more detail than I thought I would but this is my journal as well so don't feel like you have to read every post.

In my post a couple weeks ago, I think I said that we had tried to go to Scandinavia for our anniversary but flights and things just weren't working out so we went to Chicago instead. Well, we finally made our Scandinavian trip happen. We originally were going to fly into Stockholm, Sweden and work our way around the coast and go to Helsinki, Finland. But as we got making plans and looking closer at distances, it didn't seem logistically like a good time to go to Finland (it was 1100 miles one way). So we opted to go to fly into Stockholm and drive to Copenhagen, Denmark instead. That way we only drove about 1100 miles total.

We left from St G on the 6:00 am flight to Salt Lake. Then we took a 10:00 am flight to New York and from there took the 7:30 pm flight to Stockholm. That flight alone was just over 8 hours and there's an 8 hours time change from home. We were able to get business class on the long flight so that helped a ton with trying to sleep and pass the time (they feed you a ton better too Ü).

We got to Stockholm about 10:30 am. We rented a car for our trip and set out to find the temple on the south side of Stockholm. We had printed maps to all the places we wanted to see so it wasn't too hard to find. The temple is actually about 20 miles out of town in a suburb of Stockholm. We got there not long after a session started and had to wait a couple hours until the next one. So we took a few pictures and stopped in at the grocery store across the street to buy a few things. Once inside the temple, the couple who greeted us was from Salt Lake and they told us about 2 missionaries who were getting ready to leave on their missions to St G...such a small world. The temple is situated next to some train tracks and of all the temples I've been to, I think this was the only one where I could hear outside noises.

After the session, we got dressed and I met Randy our in the foyer where he was visiting with the temple president. He is from Salt Lake as well but served as the mission president in the Goteborg, Sweden mission so was familiar with the area. He was very nice and gave us a few ideas of things to see while we were there.

After leaving the temple, we had a 300+ mile journey ahead of us to get to the hotel we had reservations at in Goteborg. We knew when we booked the hotel that we would have a 5+ hour drive after the temple, but we weren't thinking about how tired we were going to be after travelling for the last 36 hours. Basically we drove from the east coast of Sweden to the west coast. It was really pretty country (at least what I could see before it got dark) but I was SO ready for that bed once we got to the hotel. I'm glad Randy was driving and that he was able to stay awake because I know that more than once my eyes closed for an extended amount of time. Ü