Anya and Jan go out for dinner while Angela takes Bree and Liya out. When Anya and Jan come back to the house first, they find that the cats have managed to push open the screen to the front window. Both cats are peering out the window at the beckoning nighttime world, and eyeing the distance to the ground to decide whether they can make the jump.
Bree and Liya enjoy their school’s end-of-year carnival.
Jan and Angela meet up with friends Rachel and Paul to attend a performance of “Here Lies Love”, a musical about the Marcos regime in the Philippines. The musical is set in a nightclub, and our “seats” are on the dance floor. It’s a fairly interesting story, and it’s fun when music bursts out and everyone on the dance floor gets to dance.
Liya’s 8th grade class hosts the annual student showcase, featuring a variety of student projects. Liya’s work is a “stained glass” display in the lounge inspired by the Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona.
Liya self portrait
In an effort to partially address long-standing problems with the drainage from our front driveway, we have a rain trap in the driveway replaced with a much longer trough, and have the driveway resurfaced.
We still have more issues to sort out, including the beautiful but problematic magnolia tree that keeps getting into our pipes and tearing up the sidewalk. We’d like to remove it, but it turns out to be large enough that it’s protected by city regulations. We’ve appealed to the city to let us remove it, and are waiting to hear back from them.
Liya’s last day at her K-8 school. Here’s a picture from her very first day of kindergarten in September 2008.
And here’s a picture of Liya today, on her last day of 8th grade.
Liya graduates from 8th grade in a nice ceremony at the Seattle Children’s Theater. Jan’s mom and Angela’s parents attend, and afterwards we have a good dinner at the Four Seasons hotel downtown.
Bree’s last day of 3rd grade! She (and her sisters before her) loved Ms. Lord, her 3rd grade teacher.
Scandinavia, Day 1. For our family summer vacation, we’re going to Scandinavia, where we’ve never been before. Because Anya’s starting a summer school in a week’s time, she and Angela will only join us for a week before heading back.
Our trip starts with a flight to Stockholm via Iceland. On the way, we fly over Greenland, and get to see endless miles of snow-covered mountains. We change plans in Reykjavik’s Keflavik airport, which looks really cool for an airport. On the flight to Stockholm, Jan and Bree happen to end up in extra-nice seats, which makes it easier for Bree to finally pass out from exhaustion.
We arrive in Stockholm’s airport, take a train to the Central Station, and manage to find a minivan taxi that can take all five of us. We check into the Lydmar Hotel, which looks out on water and sits right next to the nice National Museum (which is unfortunately closed for renovation). Anya wants to stay up and try to get on local time, but she’s the only one — the rest of us crash. Jan wakes everyone up a few hours later, and we walk across a bridge to the old town neighborhood of Gamla Stan. We stroll the narrow streets for a while, and decide to sit down at an Italian restaurant just as the skies open and torrential rain comes down.
In the evening, Anya holes up in the bathroom for a long time — and emerges with a short haircut. She decided she wants to cut her hair short, and wanted to do it herself. The result actually looks pretty good, and she’s happy with it.
In the evening, we keep hearing busses playing loud music and carrying hordes of screaming young adults drinking beer. The hotel explains that these are high school seniors celebrating their graduation.
The sun sets pretty late in Stockholm, maybe 10:00 pm, and rises early, around 3:30. The hotel’s curtains can’t keep out the sun, so we’re happy we all brought eye masks.
Scandinavia, Day 2. The hotel’s breakfast is really good, and the girls rediscover that European hot chocolate is better than American hot chocolate. They also discover that the hotel has a second, smaller elevator: a tiny old-style closet-sized elevator with a door that has to be shut by hand, and which goes up the middle of a spiral staircase. Bree will use this elevator as much as possible over the rest of the week.
We walk to the Vasa Museum, home to a huge, impressive, gorgeously detailed ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 and was raised in 1961. On the way back to the hotel, we stop for lunch at a waterside cafe. The rain drizzles on and off.
Anya wants to go shopping, so Angela takes her and Liya joins them. They end up shopping at an H&M department store (which Anya and Liya could do anywhere). Jan and Bree go back to the hotel to nap.
Later on, Jan, Angela, and Liya go to a cafe called Vete-Katten which was recommended by the hotel. It takes a while to get to and to find. We take the metro there, descending far below ground to a subway station that has a weird sculpture grotto in a roughly hewn rock chamber. We end up finding the cafe sooner than expected, but it’s the back entrance. When we walk in, we can see neither counter nor waitstaff. We eventually walk through a maze of halls to find the front of the cafe and order, then find a table in a dimly-lit nautically themed room. On the way out to the street, we discover there’s a much fancier, brighter upstairs main level to the cafe. Oh, well.
We have dinner at Österlånggatan 17, which is nice enough, but there’s a long wait after appetizers, and the dinner’s just okay. Liya shares an awkward moment: she went to use the bathroom, and opens the door to a tiny antechamber with two WCs off of it. There’s a woman waiting to use the bathroom there. Liya’s not sure whether to close the door on the women and wait outside, but she assumes the wait will be short, so she walks in and let the door close. She and the woman end up spending an uncomfortably long time stuck together in the tiny room.
We finally have a bit of nice sunny weather on the walk back to the hotel.
Scandinavia, Day 3. More sunny weather. We have another great breakfast at the hotel. We discovered that, in addition to the buffet, they also have a short menu. Liya orders pancakes, which turns out to be a large number of tiny, thin, yummy pancakes.
We walk to the Swedish History Museum. Some of the boulevards we walk along are really wide and have a central walking path lined with trees. This makes for a pleasant walk. At the museum, the girls are sort of interested in the Viking section. We pay particular attention to a section on the Viking town of Birka, since we’ll be going there tomorrow. There’s also a bit about runes. It’s interesting that name of Birka in runes, ᛒᛁᚱᚲᚨ, looks pretty close to the English word.
In the gift shop, we spend some time playing old board games. Anya plays Nine Men’s Morris with Jan, but makes an early mistake and falls behind. She wants to keep playing so she can win. Meanwhile, Angela and Liya play another game, Hnefatafl, although the rules aren’t really explained well.
From the museum, we walk along more beautiful tree-lined boulevards. Bree gets cranky, probably because she’s hungry, so we stop for a snack. A little while later, she completely perks up when we stop at a candy store. We notice that Swedes seem to really like salty black licorice, which we avoid.
We aim at the city’s Saluhall food hall for lunch. The main hall’s closed for renovation, but the temporary hall looks really nice. We walk all the way around the large hall trying to find a place serving food the girls (particularly Bree) will eat. We end up at, of all things, a Texas BBQ place which is just okay.
After lunch we try to visit the National Museum’s temporary exhibit at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern. It takes a while to find the building, then to find the correct floor. Bad luck: the museum happens to be closed on a few random days in June, including today. The building also houses a children’s library that we explore for a bit. Bree particularly likes a huge wooden bookcase/play structure thing with secret passages, staircases, and rooms inside it. We also check out the building’s teen library, which looks like a fun place to hang out.
We’re tired by this point so take a cab back to the hotel and rest. In the late afternoon, we walk back to Gamla Stan so Anya can buy a touristy “Stockholm” sweatshirt. We stop for chocolate-dipped soft serve vanilla ice cream. It’s pretty good, but Liya’s begins to melt instantly and drips everywhere. We have dinner at a restaurant called Tradition which, not surprisingly, offers riffs on traditional Swedish food. Anya, Liya, and Angela all try potato dumplings which are quite good but incredibly dense. Bree’s happy with Swedish meatballs.
Scandinavia, Day 4. We take a boat tour to the Viking archeological site at Birka. We’ve got some beautiful weather for the trip, and the tour boat makes a number of stops at various islands along the way. A woman narrator offers stories about the places we’re seeing in Swedish and English. She mentions that the sole restaurant on the island we’re going to is closed, so we eat a modest lunch on board. This includes long skinny hot dogs which are at least twice as long as the hot dog buns provided with them.
At Birka, we walk through the small museum that includes a big diorama of how the Viking town there may have looked. (If the diorama is anything to go by, the town was, above all, muddy.) We take a guided walking tour that makes its way over some burial mounds to a point overlooking the grassy field where the ruins of Birka are buried. As the tour guide speaks about the town, a flock of sheep bleats behind him. After the tour, we kill some time waiting for the boat back to Stockholm by swinging on a set of three large rope swings.
Anya still wants to play Nine Men’s Morris with Jan again, so she and Bree construct a board from paper and game counters from tiny pebbles and sticks. Jan and Anya play on the boat ride back, and Anya gets her win. Bree and Liya play afterwards, taking up Jan’s suggestion to use jellybeans as game counters, and eating the captured pieces.
For our last night in Stockholm, we’ve got reservations at a nice restaurant called Matbaren at a neighboring hotel. It turns out the hotel is hosting some dignitary who’s either arriving or departing, so the entire hotel is cordoned off by security guards. We tell a guard we have reservations at the restaurant inside, setting off a chain of conversations that eventually get us inside the building. The restaurant hostess can’t find our reservation, until she discovers that Jan mistakenly made our reservation for 9:00, not 7:00 as he thought. We go back to the hotel to wait, snacking on food from the hotel room fridges. When we finally sit down to a late dinner at 9:00, the food turns out to be pretty good. The restaurant doesn’t serve regular courses, but instead small courses ordered one at a time; a full meal is three or four courses. Anya normally eats vegetarian, but for this vacation has been eating meat. She likes a seared beef course so much, she orders it twice.
Scandinavia, Day 5. We take a train from Stockholm to Malmö. The train’s fast but sways back and forth, and both Angela and Liya feel a little sick. It’s raining when we arrive in Malmö, but our hotel is just a short walk away, so we walk as quickly as we can through the drizzle. We check into our hotel, and discover the girls have a particularly nice view from their room. They can see the Øresund Bridge that links Sweden and Denmark. (We’ll travel over that bridge tomorrow.)
Jan and Angela want to go out to get coffee, but it starts to rain hard, so the girls don’t want to go out. We decide to just go downstairs for coffee, so Liya decides she’ll come for tea. When we’ve finished our drinks, the weather’s cleared a bit, so we go out and look around. There’s a canal nearby, and Angela sees a dock for an outfit called Book-a-Boat. They offer self-service rentals of electronic boats. She’s keen to try this, so we go back and collect Anya and Bree. Sadly, even though there are two boats sitting at the dock, they’re apparently both reserved. Perhaps they were reserved by people who decided not to go out in the rain, but in any event we can’t take out a boat.
We decide to walk the short distance to the old town. Anya sees another H&M outlet, and decides she wants to go shopping again. Liya does too, so the rest of us wait for an hour while they shop. We have dinner afterwards at a Korean restaurant named Namu. They have outside seating with heat lamps (which makes the chilly air tolerable). They bring out a little grill for cooking on. It turns out this is the first night they’ve offered customers the opportunity to grill for themselves, so we’re happy we were able to do that.
Scandinavia, Day 6. We walk to the Malmö central station, grab a quick breakfast at Espresso World, and board a train for the short ride across the water to Copenhagen. Angela and Anya have to leave for home today at 2:30, so we’ll only have the morning together, and there are a few design shops that we want to visit.
We check our luggage in coin lockers, and take cabs to the center of Copenhagen’s old town. Along the way, Jan finds out that Angela and Anya’s flight has been delayed by 5 hours, so it looks like we can actually spend most of the day together. We visit the Stilleben design shop, which has interesting small design-y things, and then the huge Illums Bolighus department store with tons of interesting design-y things.
For better or worse, we find out that the airline has rebooked Angela and Anya on an earlier flight at 2:00 pm, so we have to hustle back to station after all. They catch the train to the airport. As luck would have it, they get bumped to first class for the flight to Reykjavik, and then again for the flight to Seattle.
Meanwhile, Jan, Liya, and Bree walk to our hotel, Axel Guldsmeden, near Copenhagen’s central station. The room’s not ready, so we leave our bags and follow the hotel’s recommendation of a cafe called Granola for lunch. It’s quite good.
Back at the hotel, our rooms are ready. There are two cute adjoining rooms, one with bunk beds for Bree and Liya. Bree lets Liya have the top bunk. We walk back to the old town again so that Bree can visit the Lego flagship store. She buys a medium-sized Lego kit she could get anywhere in the States, but it’s still more fun to get it at this store in Denmark. Liya wants to buy a new raincoat, but we can’t find any promising stores.
We eat dinner at a very well-reviewed pizza place, but it’s nothing special.
Scandinavia, Day 7. We have a nice breakfast in the hotel. The most interesting thing on offer is Danish pålægschokolade: thin sheets of dark chocolate which are meant to be served atop buttered bread. They’re awesome.
We leave the hotel in the late morning and head out to the suburbs to a place that has high ropes courses in trees. The girls have done this activity several times before, and both are excited to do it again. We make our way out to the suburbe of Roskilde, and take a nice walk through park to a restaurant called Pipers Hus. They offer tasty brunch plates, and it’s a wonderfully sunny day to eat at a table outside. Bree tries a sip of the Danish raspberry juice Jan’s ordered, and really likes it.
After lunch, Jan realizes that Google Maps has brought us to the wrong town. The company that runs the high ropes courses has two locations, and despite having carefully pasted in the address of one of the locations, Google Maps has brought us to the other location. We hustle back to the station, take a train to another town, then hunt down a taxi.
The taxi takes us to a nondescript residential area and down a nondescript street, where it deposits us at the end of a random driveway. We get out and look around as the taxi speeds off. It sinks in that we’ve been let down by Maps again. Jan tries again to find the right location, which turns out to be half a mile away. There are no cars or busses anywhere in sight — no people, really — so we have to walk in the early afternoon heat.
We finally make it to the right location, which turns out to be a park, around 1:30 pm. We’re worried we’ve lost our spot, but it turns out that everything’s fine. An instructor gets us set up with climbing harnesses and helmets, and gives us a short safety briefing before turning us loose.
We climb up a ladder to the first of three high ropes courses: bridges and obstacles of various kinds strung up between trees. We make our way around the first course, then tackle the second, slightly more challenging course. Liya wants to do the third and hardest course, but Bree’s already finding the second somewhat difficult, so Liya goes off on her own while Jan and Bree do the first course again. Liya makes her way through the third course, which includes 3 ziplines. The final zipline is very long and goes over a pond and marsh. Anyone coming down the zipline has to catch a rope at the end, or else find themselves sliding back down the line, where they’ll eventually come to a dangling stop over the water. Bree and Jan watch several people succumb to this fate, hanging over the water while an instructor gets a line to them and pulls them across. Liya, happily, comes zooming down the line and successfully grabs the rope to end her trip.
We’re finished for the afternoon, so we make a long walk to a train station, stopping for snacks at a gas station along the way. When we finally get back to the hotel, we collapse for a bit, then head out for dinner at a Japanese restaurant.
Scandinavia, Day 8. Liya, Bree, and Jan visit Rosenborg Castle in the morning. It’s a small, cute castle full of opulently decorated rooms, Liya gets a tourist brochure in Spanish, then does her best to translate as we go through the rooms. We visit the treasury in the basement, then go outside and cross the moat to walk around the gardens. We grab a snack in the cafe before leaving.
We spend the afternoon at Tivoli Gardens, a large garden and amusement park near our hotel. The Danish man who sells us our tickets observes that we’re very lucky to have perfect weather. We buy the “Unlimited Ride” tickets, then do our best to get our money’s worth out of those, visiting all the roller coasters and other rides we can stomach. Bree enjoys piloting the small “dragon” boats in the pond, and Liya rides the park’s largest coaster, The Demon, on her own. We finish by playing a couple of midway games: whack-a-mole, and a game in which you need to throw ping-pong balls into spinning glass bowls. The ping-bowls generally bounce out, but the carnie running the game gives the girls extra balls. We earn enough tokens to get Bree the thing she’s wanted for the past month: a fidget spinner.
Scandinavia, Day 9. We visit the National Museum of Denmark in the morning before leaving Copenhagen. There’s not much the girls want to actually see at the museum; the most interesting thing to them is an anime cosplay exhibit. We take a train to the airport, then board our flight to Iceland, our final destination for the trip.
There’s a bit of a wait at the Reykjavik airport waiting for a rental car shuttle driver to pick us up. Liya and Bree make the most of the wait by buying themselves each a donut to snack on. We pick up our rental car, and Jan drives the 45 minutes or so to the small Reykjavik Residence Hotel. The hotel’s being renovated, and it appears that they haven’t finished renovating the room we were supposed to stay in. We’ll have to stay in one room for the first two nights, then move to different rooms for the last night. They hotel apologizes for this by comping us breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant, along with a gift certificate for dinner at a nearby restaurant.
We have dinner across the street at a really good but surprisingly expensive Indian restaurant. Reykjavik seems to rival Hawaii when it comes to expensive food.
When we’re getting ready for bed at 10:00 pm, it’s still very much light outside. We’re at 66° north, so the sun sets very late and rises very early. We break out the sleep masks again.
Scandinavia, Day 10. We’re in Reykjavik for the first day of summer and the longest day of the year. The sun rose at 2:55 am this morning, and will set at 12:04 am. That’s over 21 hours of daylight!
Breakfast at the hotel restaurant isn’t bad, but the waiter leaves the door open to the cold outside air. The locals seem very happy about the “warm” weather (40–50° F today). We notice other locals walking around in shorts and t-shirts. Over the day, we’ll have three different conversations with Reykjavik residents about the weather, and each one exhibits the same attitude about the weather: the weather is most unpredictable and generally rainy, so why worry about it?
Our goal for today is to drive part of the “Golden Circle”: a long road circuit visiting a number of natural landmarks. The first of these is Þingvellir (Thingvellir) national park, site of the assembly (“thing”) at which Iceland’s parliament was founded in 930 AD. There’s a spot overlooking the valley where this happened, but when we get out of the car, there’s howling wind and rain. We look at the view for a few seconds and snap a picture before retreating. More interesting than the view is a large rocky rift in the ground marking the boundary between the separating North American and European tectonic plates. There’s a path down into the rift, and we walk down it just a bit before running back to the visitor center and hot drinks. Inside the building, we run into couple we met at the airport yesterday. We’ll run into them two more times on this short trip.
Our second stop is Gullfoss waterfall, which is beautiful, and better for a break in the rain. We eat lunch at the visitor center there. Our third and final stop is the Strokkur geyser. We watch it erupt several times, then walk quickly back to the car as the rain returns. On the drive back to Reykjavik, Jan observes to the girls that, even though we’re on a rural highway in the middle of nowhere, most cars are still going at the posted speed limit. If this were a rural highway in the States, everyone would be speeding as fast as they thought they could get away with.
We have dinner at a restaurant called Vegemot because the hotel had given us a gift certificate for it, but it’s nothing amazing.
Scandinavia, Day 11. Today we’re heading out to the Víðgelmir lava tube, about 2 hours away. We drive north from Reykjavik along the ring road that circles Iceland, passing back and forth between rain clouds and out into sun. When we get to the fjord called Hvalfjörður, the highway dives down into a tunnel deep under the fjord (down to 500 feet below sea level). The tunnel is pretty long, about 3.5 miles, and pretty fun to drive through.
We stop to look at two neighboring waterfalls, Hraunfossar and Barnafossar, on the way, then have lunch at small cafe in the hamlet of Húsafell. We get to the Víðgelmir lava tube just before 1:00 pm, in time for a guided tour. They give us helmets with headlamps, but it’s up to us to dress warmly enough for the freezing temperatures of the cave. We didn’t really come with winter clothes, so we’re wearing all the summer clothes we can manage at once.
Our guide, Katherine, gives us a briefing, then leads us on the short walk to the stairs going down into the cave’s entrance. During the tour she makes lots of jokes, often about trolls. We see some interesting ice formations, a wall of hardened lava that looks like melted chocolate, lava straws, lava candles, lava ripples, and more. When our group reaches the furthest and deepest point on the tour, Katherine asks everyone to turn off their lights for a minute so that we can sit in the utter darkness. It’s quite, and we can hear the water dripping in the cave.
On the drive back, there’s some sun, making for beautiful light on the green slopes, the black volcanic hills, and the white misty clouds. Driving through the long Hvalfjörður tunnel is just as cool the second time around. We have dinner at a tapas-style restaurant featuring Icelandic cuisine, and it’s all pretty good.
Scandinavia, Day 12. The hotel’s restaurant has okay food but it’s kind of sad — it’s more of a nighttime bar than daytime restaurant — so for our last breakfast, we go out to a nearby bakery called Sandholt. All the food is fantastic, and Liya leaves room to finish with a lemon meringue tart.
Before heading out of the city, we stop at the Reykjavik Open Air Museum, a cluster of old buildings on an old farm. The original farm buildings have stone walls and turf roofs. Inside they smell like dirt, wood, maybe kerosene — the smell reminds Jan of his uncle Sasha’s farmhouse in upstate New York. The museum includes a playground with some old-style seesaws. Seesaws have been entirely eliminated from Seattle parks for liability reasons, so it’s fun for Liya and Bree to play on them. Jan just about balances Bree + Liya.
We drive to the Blue Lagoon hot spring for the afternoon, eating a nice lunch at the Lava restaurant there. After lunch we enter the hot spring area. It’s huge, and full of milky blue water. We enjoy slowly walking/floating/swimming around the hot spring. It’s especially enjoyable to find small pockets of extra warm water. The water contains minerals that have the effect of stiffening hair, however, and Liya’s long, fine hair will remain stiff for several days afterwards.
It’s a short drive from the Blue Lagoon back to the airport. As we’re forced through the duty free shop, the girls spot an interesting candy item. It’s a sort of meta TicTac package: a giant plastic TicTac box containing small, pill-like plastic boxes, which in turn contain actual TicTacs. Jan was going to buy them snacks for the plane, but all they want is this TicTac box, so that’s what they get.
Bree attends a ninja-themed “Escape the Room” event as a birthday celebration for her friend, Moira. They don’t escape the room in time, but do quite well, and have a great time.
Bree attends a week-long summer camp at which she assembles a laptop computer kit, then learns a bit of the Python programming language on it. At the end of the week, she’s excited to bring home a device that’s entirely her own. She spends the evening working on a program.