Arrival

It's July 9th, and I'm here in Stockholm! I took an extra leg to get here, making today's journey not so bad. Because I flew on Icelandair, I took advantage of their stopover deal. They allow you to stay up to 7 nights in Iceland, and they treat it like a layover. In other words, there was no extra charge to my plane ticket. How could I pass up that opportunity? And since I had to pay for my flight anyway, why not bring my wife and kids along for our first international family vacation?

I'll include more on Iceland and its clearly different climate and geography in another post. The biggest benefit of the stopover is that I had a much shorter flight today. After seeing my family off this morning, I was able to get some much, much needed rest--Iceland is more of an adventure than a vacation--before my three hour flight into Stockholm.

I arrived with two of my fellow travelers--always a relief to have someone with you when you arrive in new country. We grabbed a bus into town, dragged our luggage over a few blocks and down a long flight of stairs, and checked into our hotel. It's pretty late now, and I'm excited to see real nighttime for the first time in 6 days, so I'm off to bed.

We've got big plans for tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to including as many updates as I can.