Stockholm is Seattle's sister.

Thursday was far from the easy day trip we all imagined it would be. the day before, Beau took Chloe, Jon, and I out for one last night to drink together. Thursday was filled with all of us calling each other trying to figure out when we were leaving, who has the boxes for our bikes, finding out that the place we originally thought we were going to get the boxes had them but at a premium price none of us wanted to pay and a lot of panic. Throw on top of that some tears from loved ones and a hangover and you got yourself a pretty rough morning, but we made it on time and with everything we needed. Our flight was Seattle > Iceland > Sweden. We left Seattle around 4:30pm and got to Stockholm around 1:00 pm the next day. When flying over Sweden it looks just like western Washington with evergreen trees all over the place, but its flat.

We were met by Chris' uncle Rob at the airport. Him and his wife are letting us stay at their place for a few days while we get over jet lag and wait out a few days of rain. They cook us food and deal with three grown men napping all over their house pretty well. I've never seen people be so nice to a nephew and strangers. I pretty beat from the plane ride and thought I'd chill around town while Chris and Josh went to Stockholm. After a nap I walked around Kallhall to the local lake and thought about how this is my life for the next three months, Nothing but adventuring and living life at my own pace. As i was walking around the lake though, I noticed that the sun was still pretty high for how late in the day it was.

  So get this, the sun sets here at 10:30pm and raises at 3:30am and never really gets pitch black at this time of year. Yeah, 5 hours of this kinda sort of almost dark is all they get. The next day we all took the train to Stockholm for the evening. The buildings here are tall old and amazing. We have nothing like it in the states. If you head over to the older parts of the town you hit narrow old stone roads with gutters carved into the stone. It was raining pretty hard too, but that wasn't stopping us and or the rest tourist from roaming the streets. We went into an old church that they turned into a museum and stumbled onto a major boat race happening on one of the many waterways that Stockholm is built around. We walked around some more and looking at the menus on the shop windows and found out that it's all pretty expensive here. We decided to pass on eating out in Stockholm and make our way back to Rob's for dinner made by him and his wife. Tomorrow we head out on our bikes for the first time and we are all pretty excited for the journey to really begin and even with Stockholm having some amazing buildings and cool shops, I think the best part of the trip so far has been just walking around Kallhall, spending time with friends and locals not worried about just pleasing another tourist.

    Some weird thing they do with pizza here. Calzone like.

                                                           

ps It's so much like Seattle it rained while we were walking around so my camera stayed in while i took pictures with my phone. Sorry for the bad quality.