SWEDEN !!!

I made it to Sweden on the 6th of July.  My day started at 3am when my room mates, although quiet, had to get up and leave the hotel in Venice to catch the boat to Marco Polo Airport by 4:15am.  I fell in and out of sleep till I needed to vacate the room at 9am for breakfast and checkout.  The hotel was kind enough to allow myself and a few stragglers to keep our bags in a safe place and use of the bathroom until our time to leave the island of Venice arrived.  At 3pm I gathered up my belongings and boarded the water taxi to Marco Polo Airport for my 8:25pm flight to Stockholm, Sweden.  The water taxi took about 1.5 hours and I arrived a bit too early for check in so I people watched in the little airport for an hour before my flight was allowed to check in.  Ryan Air has some weird ways of doing things: for one, you HAVE to have a boarding pass pre-printed, if not, 40 euro charge/fee.  Your bag MUST be under a certain weight or you pay 6 euros for every kilo you are over, my $35.00 flight quickly turned into a $130.00 flight because of the weight of my bag.....Lesson learned.  It is best to stand at the gate once you have passed though security at Ryan Air because they do not give you seating assignments.  Once your boarding pass has be scanned at the gate, the passengers board a bus which drives you to the plane waiting on the tarmac.  Then everyone makes a mad dash for the plane once the bus has slowed down and the doors open up....yes, that's right, you RUN TO THE PLANE for your seat.

After nearly 3 hours in the air, I arrived just south of Stockholm to the airport were S was picking me up and we then had a 2.5 hour drive to her village in the western-mid section of Sweden.  I arrived at 11pm and the sun was still making the sky light up, it was dark enough to need your headlights, but not pitch black.  The sun does not really set till after midnight and it rises before 5am.

S and I spent our first day catching up, gabbing about everything, and anything.  We drove over to see her horse and we had meatballs for dinner. Today we went to her parent's new-ish home in the forest, on the 9th largest lake in Sweden.  I say new-ish because they have had to redo nearly the entire home, from floor boards to paint.  But it is a beautiful home in the most enchanting place I have every been

Surrounded by pines and silver birches on 3 sides and a grand lake in front, one can really escape the world here.  I got to meet S's parents, who kindly invited me for lunch, and S's little niece, E.