Europe 25: From Porto to Stockholm

When we mapped out this trip we knew that our time in Florence and Porto would be packed full of activities. We would be in new places and seeing new things, and while we planned to be with friends in both of those cities we also understood that taking it easy wasn’t really part of that plan. This is why we put the Stockholm leg of the trip at the end, because we’d actually be staying in our friends’ home for that part and could just sit still for a bit if we wanted to do so.

Also, it is generally cooler in Sweden than in southern Europe, and that would be a nice reward in itself.

We woke up early on our final day in Porto because we had to get to the airport. Since scaling the hills of Porto first thing in the morning was not really an attractive prospect, particularly with our bags – even just carry-on and a personal item gets heavy after a while – we’d arranged for a Bolt (the European equivalent of Uber) to pick us up instead. At the appointed hour we made our way out to the sidewalk and the driver showed up right on time.

This was a man who definitely enjoyed his job. We got to see a lot of the parts of Porto that we hadn’t seen before and at an astonishing clip, but he got us there safely and with plenty of time to get through security and hang out at the little restaurant near our gate while we waited for our flight to Stockholm.

Meanwhile Lauren was completing her journey to meet us there. Her graduate program started about a week after her undergrad graduation ceremony in May so she was in class while we were in Florence and Porto, but when that class was over she’d arranged to come out to Sweden to spend the week with us. She ended up taking a long and fairly circuitous route involving a surprising number of rescheduled flights through entirely different cities than the ones she’d planned originally, and we just kept track as best we could.

For all that, though, she got there well ahead of us, took the train from Arlanda Airport to Stockholm – pausing for a brief time while the train lost power – and then a different train from Stockholm to Huddinge where our friends live.

So not only did we have our friends to look forward to seeing, as we sat there in the Porto airport, but also our daughter! Life is good.

Eventually it was our turn to fly and we boarded the plane to Sweden.

It is a surprisingly long flight from Porto to Stockholm – a bit more than double the two hours that I’d thought it would take – but we arrived at Arlanda without any particular troubles. International flights should not be exciting, as that usually means something has gone wrong. We made our way out of the gate toward the main terminal and from there it was about a hundred years of wandering through hallways, up escalators, around corners, and across vast open spaces before we finally found the train platforms, and eventually we too were whisked toward Stockholm’s city center, though without the power failure.

It turns out that finding the 41 train to Huddinge from there was more of a trick than we thought it would be. It was clear that we needed to find a new train, at least – the airport express had quite literally come to the end of its tracks and for it to go any further would have meant ending up on the nightly news while the anchors did the Frowny Face that lets you know that things didn’t end well – but how to do that was not obvious. Fortunately Kim actually speaks Swedish and could read the signs, so in the end we got to the proper train and were zipping along on the commuter rails toward our friends.

David picked us up at the train station in Huddinge. It’s been a while since we’ve seen him and he’s only gotten taller since then, which is a bit of a trick given that their cars have gotten smaller. But it all worked out and soon we were relaxing with Lauren, Mats and Sara, as well as their exchange student Frieda. Frieda is German, and since Mats, Sara, and Lauren have all lived in Germany and speak the language well the conversations over the week tended to veer from English to Swedish to German and back again, and since I only understand one of those languages I just let it all wash over me. It's a fascinating experience if you let it be one.

It is a lovely thing to stay with friends who you can simply relax with, especially far from home, and we did a lot of just hanging out and talking while we were there. We did a lot of other things too, don’t get me wrong – we saw a fair bit of Stockholm and kept ourselves busy with sights and sounds. But being able to spend an evening or two playing cards or board games with good people gathered around a kitchen table is a nice break.

We sat down for dinner and then wandered out to the porch for a while, just to hang out.

We met the cats, both the old one and the new one.

And after a while we wandered back inside to the kitchen table, which is where one naturally gravitates in comfortable places, I find.

Eventually the travelling caught up with us and we headed off to bed. Lauren bunked in the lower level of the house, while Kim and I went to the little guest cottage out back.

And just like that, the last leg of our trip began.