traveldiary.stracke.us

We have to go (fly) the extra mile(s) to get to Marseille, our summer vacation destination.
It is Thursday, June 26, and we are in Newark Airport, trying to check in with Air Canada. I had booked our flight on December 4, 2007, taking advantage of an excellent airfare to fly Air Canada from Newark to Paris, connecting in Montreal. This fare was actually less expensive than the non-stop flight from Montreal.
This is all academic now. We are being informed, that the Newark-Montreal flight has been canceled (for the third day in a row). We are going through the usual tug-of-war negotiations with the gate agent: I decline offers to fly the next day or fly on Air Portugal via Lisbon later that night. We are going through all the Star Alliance partner airlines. United has a flight from Dulles Airport, Lufthansa from Newark via Munich. By the time the agent tries to ticket and confirm our new flights, the seats are gone.

(more…)

We spent June 16th in Copenhagen, having yet another sunny day. On the way back to Malmö, the odors in our train compartment got a little musty. A group of air travellers had joined us at Copenhagen Lufthaven (airport).They were on their way home to Sweden and apparently were not using any deodorant. This is actually quite common with Europeans and they don’t seem to mind the smell of the natural odors (stink).
On June 17th we killed some time at the internet in Malmö, before boarding our night train to Berlin.
We had our private 2 bed sleeper compartment and were already in bed when the train pulled out of the Malmö, Sweden station at 21:52.
(more…)

Midnight Sun, a romantic term, a natural phenomena, that I always wanted to see. It is beautiful! But the days seem to go on and on and on. Anywhere above the Arctic Circle, you have at least one full day of daylight in the summer, so all of the Scandinavian countries enjoy this wonderful gift of nature. In Narvik, we were well above the Arctic Circle latitude, so the sun here does not fully set between the beginning of June until the beginning of July. Since Lothar had broken his watch, he was living in a type of twilight zone, never knowing what time it was. Every few hours, he’d venture the question about time and at each incident, he was surprised to hear the answer. His body clock and the sun clock just didn’t jive. We spoke to some locals, especially an engineering student, who was living in our B&B, and he told us that the Scandinavian people had this same problem, no matter how long they had been living here. I would have thought that people adjust more readily.
(more…)

We left Narvik, Norway ( Latitude 68 degrees 25′ North, longitude 17 degrees 33′ East) on June 14th at 15:45.
We had slept until noontime to make up for the lack of sleep during the early morning hours ( remember, no night here). We were lucky again, because the train was stuck on the single track in Björkliden, Sweden and we received a free bus tour across the mountains to meet our train. The scenery reminded us of the Adirondacks, and the red wooden houses on the shores of the many lakes along the way looked like New England. We even saw a few reindeer and some lakes still had ice floating around.
We boarded our Connex train # 93, and the conductor gave us a six- person sleeper compartment, all to ourselves. We paid very little money and had more luxury than in the 2-person sleeper compartment we had had on the way here. This only happened after Gabi showed her displeasure with the high price tag for a private 1st class compartment, I had inquired about. Maybe the conductor liked us or he just was plain nice !
We had a picnic dinner on the train and went to bed, the sun still shining. In the morning, we woke up with clouds and rain outside, and realized how lucky we had been to see the midnight sun for 2 1/2 days without a cloud in the sky.
(more…)

We tried to make a train reservation on Saturday, June 11th. The main train station in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, can not process international train reservations on Saturday or Sunday. So much for spontaneous weekend trips.
Last week in Germany, we had booked a sleeper compartment for 2 persons on the Connex train from Stockholm to Boden.
We had dinner in Stockholm prior to boarding our night train at 21:27 on Sunday, June12th.
The compartments were tiny and we were glad to be in first class, so we did not have to share the cabin with other passengers. The quality of sleep on the train was only fair : lots of curves and sliding in the direction of our feet in the left-hand turns, in the opposite direction in right-hand turns !
Sweden is about 1000 miles south to north and we saw mostly trees : birches, Scots pines and Norwegian spruce. Hours and hours of trees.

(more…)

After a frustrating morning trying to acquire return train tickets from way up north in the Land of the Midnight Sun, Norway, to return back to Stockholm and on to Berlin, we spend a leisurely afternoon exploring Sweden’s past. Can you believe you can not book international railroad tickets out of Sweden on a weekend. They don’t work on the weekend….isn’t this taking the “social welfare state” a bit far? Next we discovered that it is more expensive to book a sleeper car for the same train here in Sweden than it was in Germany . Why? Cause the Swedish company puts a hefty profit on the service, whereas the German Rail does not. Believe me, if we could have booked our return through the Bundesbahn in Germany, we would have. But that was not possible, since the Swedish train company would not allow it. Everything is super expensive here! The government has it’s hand in everything with a value added tax rate of 25%.
The people pay over 50% in taxes from their income, but they are taken care of from cradle to grave. I’m still evaluating whether this is good or bad………. the jury will be in when I learn more!
Back to the title of this post.
(more…)

Yesterday we flew on Hapag Lloyd Express from Hannover, Germany to Stockholm, Sweden. We boarded our yellow machine, that looks like a New York City Taxi cab. We crossed the Baltic Sea and were soon over beautiful forests, green hills and hundreds of islands, comprising southern Sweden. We caught a bus into the city center and soon found our hotel for the next 2 nights, a boat in the harbor. The first room we were given had only a small porthole and being a bit claustrophobic, this was not a real good fit. The host switched us to the smaller boat next door, where our room now had two nice windows with a beautiful view of the Stadshuset (town hall) across the waters.
(more…)