29 July - The Longest Day

We were up and out and breakfasted and back to the room and packed by 09:30. Our flight home was scheduled for 16:30 so we had time for one more excursion — a splendid last look at Stockholm. We parked our bags with the hotel and went off for one more trip on the T-Bana, to see the Ericsson Globe.

This attraction had not come up while David was planning the trip. It was mentioned as "SkyView" in the Stockholm Card brochure's list of discounted places, said to be a high viewing platform, like the Kaknäs tower we assumed, so we just ignored it.

However, coming back into port from the archipelago Sunday evening we had noted an odd white dome on the horizon.

At first we thought it might be the moon rising...

Curious, we looked it up. The Ericsson Globe is an arena in a hemispherical dome — the largest one in the world. It seats 13,000 for hockey, more for other events like monster truck rallies or the Eurovision song contest. Here's how it looked as we approached it Tuesday morning.

Skyview is the system of two little bubble-cars that operate as a funicular.

We paid, then had to wait 40 minutes for our turn. It's a pretty popular attraction. Each car carries 16 people, and takes about 20 minutes to load, go up, come down, and unload. So they can process about 100 people an hour. Eventually our turn came.

And up we went.

At the top the car pauses a few minutes for gazing, before starting down. We took a few pictures.

Looking NE toward the Archipelago.

A panorama of the view to the SE — central Stockholm with the main river and bridges in the center.

Click this and scroll around. It's like you were there! OK, not really.

And so back to the hotel. On the way, a text arrived from the airline: Your departure delayed until 21:30 for technical reasons; so sorry, a meal voucher will be provided. Later, another text: Departure moved to 22:30.

So now instead of sitting around the hotel lobby until 13:00 as planned, we needed to while away the time until 19:00.

OK, so we used the time to complete and publish blog posts for the two preceding days. And eat a large lunch of Swedish meatballs, potato purée and lingonberry jam — the classic Swedish meal we had somehow missed in our nine days in Sweden — it was delicious! And we still had time to kill, sigh. We sat around the Radisson lobby until 17:00, then took the Arlanda Express to Arlanda airport. This is a deluxe train that departs every 15 minutes from the central station for a 20-minute ride to the airport. It hit 230kph, which was fun. We considered it might be as fast as the TGV we rode in France or the Bullet train in Japan, but looking it up now, it seems not. Both of those go 1.5 to 2 times as fast. But it's fast for an airport connection.

At the airport we checked in our bags and idled away another hour in the courtyard of the Clarion Airport Hotel, and finally went through security and toward the gate with two hours until departure. However the gate for this flight was behind a security barrier, as it represented a point of departure from Sweden. We asked the guard if we could come back out once in. He asked, "Are you waiting for the flight to Oakland that's delayed?" Yes. "Well, there's no food or anything in there, you might want to wait out here," (i.e. among the non-secure gates with shops and such) "a while longer." So we did. Spent our generous meal vouchers: 100 krone each ($16) on two bananas and two energy bars. Found English books to read in the bookstore. Found ice-cream bars.

Finally, an hour before the re-re-scheduled departure, we entered the secure gate area and found a queue of people who looked like they were boarding a flight! Asked; yes, this was the flight to Oakland. Well, all right! It was a long queue (the flight was a full 787, so, lots of people) and Marian made David sit down and wait until it was all but finished. "We have assigned seats, there's no rush."

Indeed there was no rush, because it turned out, when we went through, that the people weren't boarding at all. They were being checked-in, but only into a separate boarding lounge. So the full passenger load of a 787, about 300 people, were in a room with seating for maybe 200, and the airport A/C wasn't handling it well. Here we waited for another 40 minutes.

Stewed passengers.

We were not feeling kindly toward Norwegian Express airline. This was quite incompetent and inhumane.

We finally boarded and settled in for a 10-hour flight which pushed back at 23:30. Ten hours, minus the 9-hour time difference, we would be arriving around 1am Wednesday.

This was our first ride in a 787 "Dreamliner"; it impressed in three ways. First, there was more than enough overhead storage for all the roll-on bags and backpacks people were carrying. Second, the seat-back screens were high-resolution touch screens, easy to operate and with lots of entertainment options. Third, there was adequate knee-room in Economy.

However, we mostly slept, getting probably 5 hours of sleep in the 10-hour flight. On arrival at Oakland, they kept the doors closed for ten minutes after the seatbelt sign had gone off. "Another plane is in customs," the announcement went, "and they'd like us to wait a little while."

Other people have commented on the stark difference between U.S. border security and the rest of the world so we won't beat on that horse. Much. But this is a picture of the line just after we entered it (and just before a guard shouted about no photos please.)

It may be a federal crime to look at this picture.

We were in the line just under an hour (and we had been seated in row 12 of the plane; the majority of the mob was behind us). Arriving at Copenhagen we waited maybe ten minutes for a quick stamp in the passport. Arriving in Norway from Denmark, the passport control window was closed, and we just walked past it. Arriving in Sweden from Norway there were no formalities whatever, except we had to change trains.

Just sayin'.

Anyway, at 2am we were into the arrival hall at Oakland airport. Things that work well? Uber works well. Two in the A.M. and you just open the Uber app, it knows exactly where you are, you tap once for a ride, it tells you exactly how many minutes until your car arrives. It shows you a map with a little car approaching your location, updated in real time. It comes, you climb in, you ride Oakland to Palo Alto for less than a shared-ride van would cost.

Home at 3am, found Marian's sister had stocked us with snacks and milk, all good. Twenty-nine hours after we'd arisen in Copenhagen, we were home.