I finally typed up lots of entries about last year's trip to Europe!

Here are the basics of what we did, and links to journal entries about each leg of the trip.

• August 12, 2012: Flew to Munich.
• August 13: Arrived in Munich.
• August 14: Departed on our hike over the Alps from Munich to Venice.
  • Read day-by-day summaries of our hike at jaeuropetrip ( Read more... )

We woke up early, and Laurel drove us to the airport. From there, we flew to Denver, with a layover in New Jersey. Not much to say about that, other than that we got some fantastic scenery on the Stockholm-Jersey leg of the flight. I don't feel like embedding them all, but start here, and continue through the photostream for more. Snow, fjords, ( Read more... )

Laurel was back to work, and we went back into Stockholm. We did a bunch of walking around, especially in Södermalm, which I guess is the "cool" neighborhood. Apparently made famous by Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but neither of us has seen that. We walked up on a big hill overlooking the water and other parts of Stockholm, and we peeked in the ( Read more... )

At some point, somehow, I noticed a recipe for Swedish pancakes on, I think, the inside of the egg crate. I'm not really sure how that happened, or how I figured out what it was for, considering that the recipe was in Swedish. We somehow puzzled it out and made Swedish pancakes for breakfast, and ate them with lingonberry jam. They were really good ( Read more... )

We had a nice breakfast with Laurel, and then we all got in the car to go to a Christmas market. I really don't remember the name of the town it was in, but it was like an hour drive away and it was a cute little town. The Christmas market was really cool. Basically, all kinds of neat stuff handmade by artisans. Cool candlesticks, beautiful weaving ( Read more... )

Here is the farm where Laurel lives on Friday morning. Note the frost on the grass. It was cold when we were in Sweden. Various scarves and sweaters that had been dead weight on this whole trip proved themselves worth bringing on these chilly days.


( Read more... )

Initially, we'd thought about taking the bus from Mai's to the train station, but then we were really unsure about whether we would actually succeed at this. We had trouble putting the right change together, and we also weren't sure if the bus would even take cash. (This is a thing, Scandinavians are too advanced for cash or something. We had a ( Read more... )

...What did we even do on this day? I'm not really sure.

Okay, wait, I remember one thing. We definitely went to the art museum. We went to the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery), which is free! And very large! It was good ( Read more... )

Mai had suggested two excursions that we could do: going up to Helsingor, AKA Elsinor of Hamlet fame, and coincidentally her home town; or going to the town of Roskilde and seeing the Viking Museum there. We both thought that the viking museum sounded good so we decided to do that ( Read more... )

This was sort of our "explore Copenhagen alone" day. We started by dropping by Mai's office at the university. We had coffee and tried to see the ice core lab, but she didn't have the current code for the door ( Read more... )