Back in April, when Diana went to Iceland for the weekend with her friend Mimi, I decided to be adventurous and take Maddie and Ada on a weekend trip to Stockholm.

We left right after school for a six hour train ride to Stockholm. Here are Ada and Maddie about 4 hours into the train ride, somewhere around their usual bedtime.

And here they are around 11 at night on a Friday when we finally arrived at our AirBnB

We stayed in an apartment in a beautiful 400 year old building right in the middle of Gamla Stan, the historic heart of Stockholm.

Of course, the first thing we did was go and see the Nobel Prize Museum.

We spent most of our time searching for artifacts from Marie Curie, but the girls did complete a cute “Road to My Own Nobel Prize” activity…

Which did lead to a (chocolate) Nobel Prize

For lunch, we had the traditional Swedish meatballs,

followed by ice cream (blueberry lavender flavor).

We took a ferry over to Junibacken, a great kids play area themed around Swedish children’s stories, and the girls played on a sledding simulator that let you pretend you were going down a long and winding sled run.

Shortly after our adventure at Junibaken, Ada started to complain that her tummy hurt, and Maddie was weary from all of the walking. We made it back to our AirBnB, and I thought we’d try for dinner nearby after a short rest. Unfortunately, just as we got to the restaurant around the corner, with me carrying Ada, she began to tap on my shoulder as I inquired about a table. When I looked at Ada, I saw her hand was over her mouth, and so we quickly ran from the restaurant, getting out the front door just in time for her to throw up over me and her just outside the front steps of the restaurant.

And so we trudged back to our AirBnB to got cleaned up, ordered some Chinese food on delivery, and capped the evening with some videos.

On Sunday, we went to the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm, before catching a 3 hour train followed by a 3 hour bus ride back.

All in all it was a great trip, and reminded me that Maddie and Ada are becoming very good traveling companions, and that I should stay open to last minute adventures.

For much of this spring, we’ve been thinking about what to do for a final trip after the girls completed school. At first, we wanted to visit Lofoten, a beautiful part of northern Norway, but all our research seemed to indicate that it would be pretty hard to see all that we wanted to see without a car. And, in order to drive in Norway, we would need to complete the very expensive and difficult driving test, which didn’t seem worth it.

So, we decided to make a return to Sweden, this time to revisit Stockholm with Diana, but also to see Midsomer, the Swedish celebration of the summer solstice.

After Maddie and Ada finished school on June 20, we took a bus to Karlstad, Sweden, and rented a car—a tiny Volkswagen Golf with a manual transmission. Even though I’ve loved not driving for the past year, it was nice to get behind the wheel of a car again. It was way less nice when filling up a little more than half a tank of gas. Roughly 25 liters of gas (about 6 gallons) cost us nearly 50 dollars! It made me very glad we had abandoned our original idea of renting a campervan and driving around Sweden.

Our first destination was just outside the town of Leksand, in the Dalarna region, which is home to “real Sweden” everyone told us, and the place everyone goes to celebrate Midsomer. And they were right—Dalarna is beautiful. Everywhere along the roads you see beautiful pink, and purple wildflowers, and this was the view outside our hotel window.

The big celebration of Midsomer takes place in the afternoon on the Solstice, and centers around decorating a maypole, and then heaving it up into standing position in an intricate process using several pairs of long wooden sticks and lots of people.

Once the pole is lifted, everyone dances around it to Swedish folk music.

This process takes a while, and it involves a lot of instructions in Swedish, so Maddie and Ada weren’t so thrilled that we saw 3 maypoles being hoisted on Midsomer weekend, including one children sized one that Ada helped to decorate.

Adults and children (boys and girls) also wear crowns out of wildflowers, and here is Ada, somewhat reluctantly modeling the crown Diana made for her.

At our last May pole hoisting, Maddie and Ada really just wanted to run around and play.

Dalarna is also famous for the Dela Horse, a red wooden horse hand painted in folk designs that has become a national symbol of Sweden. We spent an afternoon visiting a factory for these horses and painting our own versions.

We also visited Sommarland, a small amusement park near Lekesand. Like the amusement park in Lillihammer we visited, Sommarland was more low key, and seems to operate under the principle of providing fairly unstructured opportunities for kids to have fun. In this case, there was a small 1.5 foot deep lake in the middle of the park, and boats of all types—canoes, kayaks, paddleboat for kids to just take out. There was also a BMX bike course set up, and kids (or adults) could just borrow a bike and take it out on the course. There are also plenty of water slides. The 60°F temperatures didn’t seem to bother most kids, but after about 20 minutes of splashing around in the kiddie pool, Maddie and Ada decided they were cold, and so we spend most of the rest of our day doing activities on land, like jumping on a giant inflatable air bag.

And driving small electric vehicles around a kid-sized city. The awesome thing here was that kids were basically free to use these vehicles for as long as they liked, taking turns when another child comes around wanting to drive—no queues or timers necessary.

And here’s Ada on the bungee trampoline, which she loved

Followed by a dive into a big air bag

Following these adventures in the heart of Sweden, we drove to Stockholm, and one of the first things I noticed was how compact the city is. When we were half an hour from our hotel in the center of Stockholm, we were still on a four lane highway, passing farms on both sides of the road. I’ve noticed the same thing in Oslo, too, and am told that the forest line is almost sacred in Oslo, and there are many regulations to combat city sprawl.

One of our first stops was a playground in a local park in central Stockholm. They had these amazing tricycles that kids could add trailers to in all sorts of configurations. They also had people working at the playground who were constantly organizing toys and games for the kids.

We also visited Skansen, an incredible open air cultural museum, zoo and amusement park, all in one. You can tour complete historic Swedish farmhouses and villages from different time periods. When we arrived, a flock of sheep were being herded down one of the roads, and Ada followed them all the way back to her pen.

Here is Ada in the zoo part, looking through a plastic bubble at a rabbit exhibit.

We also visited the Royal Armory, which presented a good history of the Swedish monarchy, and some very beautiful carriages.

On the way to the Armory, we also made a visit back to where Ada threw up on our last trip to Stockholm.

Stockholm has a small butterfly museum/shark exhibit that we visited one morning. Here are Maddie and Ada admiring the emerging butterflies.

On our last day in Stockholm, we boarded a ferry with the intent to spend the day visiting the island of Grinda, but the the Ferry announcements were so hard to understand and the port stops were so brief, that we missed the stop for Grinda, and decided to get off at the next stop, Karklö, which turned out to be a nearly unpopulated island that only got ferry service twice a day.

Karklö was beautiful, and made for a great day hike.

We also found a bunch of fresh blueberries along the trail.

And a very pretty coastline.

Luckily, we made the last ferry back to Stockholm which was good because were scheduled to head back to Oslo for our final few days in Norway the following morning.

After five days in Rome, we took another wonderful Italian train up to Florence, and proceeded to trek from the train station to our AirBnB in the old part of town dragging a backpack and two wheeled suitcases along very narrow sidewalks, as Ada found great entertainment in trying to jump aboard the suitcases and riding them.

Once we dropped our things in our AirBnB, which was a wonderful top floor apartment in an old building with exposed beams, we made our way down to the oldest part of Florence and the Galileo Museum.

Here’s Ada playing with a brachistrochone track in a small kids area in the museum.

The upper floors of the museum were a wonderful collection of all sorts of historic scientific instruments, and made for one of those moments when I wish I had more time to explore the museum without Ada and Maddie telling me how boring everything was and wondering when we would leave. But we did see Galileo’s finger on display, just as I remember hearing about in some old science video I’ve showed my classes.

On the next day, we explored the Uffizi gallery, which is one of the most impressive art museums I’ve ever visited. The building itself is most stunning—originally commissioned by Cosimo de’Medici to house the governmental offices of Florence, it’s a clear statement to the power and wealth of the Medici family. These days, as every tour book/video warns, it is packed with tourists, so we got out timed tickets in advanced and did our best to keep Maddie and Ada engaged with the amazing art they were seeing. Here’s Maddie posing in probably the most famous painting in the museum.

The southern side of Florence, across the Arno, is stunning. Here’s a view overlooking the city.

We walked downhill from that stunning view into the center of Florence, stopping for a picnic in a rose garden.

And walking across the Arno from the Ponte Vecchio bridge, which was both stunning and very crowded.

On the way back to our AirBnB, we learned that the inspiration for Pinocchio came from a small wooden toy store called Bartolucci, which made for a great stop in the old city.

Here is a photo of the historic workshop.

By far, the highlight of our time in Florence was a workshop in pizza and gelato making. Here’s Maddie forming her pizza dough, which is far simpler to make than I had imagined.

Once the pizzas were being prepared in the oven, we took a break to make gelato, which Ada loved.

Here’s Ada with her Pizza creation, which is “super yum.”

Finally,  on the advice of a work colleague, we took a day trip to Siena, which was a great idea. After taking about a dozen escalators from the train station to the outskirts of the historic town, you walk into the center of Siena, which is totally car free.

The city itself is beautiful, and the girls loved running around the Piazza del Campo in the middle of the town.

Later in the day, we enjoyed touring the Duomo, and learning more about the various wars between Siena and Florence. Here’s a pic of Duomo from the outside:

And the ceiling inside:

Back in early January, we took a trip to Tromsø, Norway, which is at 69° N latitude, a full 10° above Oslo. Here is our view on the way in.

Tromsø is a beautiful city, especially when it’s dark. And in Tromsø it is dark almost all the time in January. This is a photo just outside our hotel at 1:30 in the afternoon. In January, you get a couple of hours of daylight around noon.

There are lots of fun things to do in Tromsø, but Maddie and Ada had the most fun climbing on and sliding down the huge snow piles around the city.

Tromsø also has some great museums. We were especially impressed by the science museum, and as you might imagine, winter and climate change were major themes.

Here’s a great exhibit exploring the symmetry of snowflakes.

And here’s Maddie and Ada trying an exhibit that simulated pushing a sled on the snow.

Notice the socks—everyone has to leave their dirty snow covered shoes at the door, a common practice in Norway.

The main reason we chose to visit Tromsø was to see the Northern Lights. Even though Tromsø was close enough to the arctic circle and we were there during the darkest time of year, light pollution and variable cloud cover meant we had to leave Trømso to actual see the lights. So, we booked an expedition to see the Northern Lights with “Chasing Lights.” We set out at 6pm on a fancy touring bus with 50 other tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of this wonder. This turned out to be quite an adventure—it was too cloudy just south of Trømso to see the Northern lights, so the bus began a long journey toward the Finnish border, stopping along the to see if the cloud cover had reduced inland. Fortunately Ada was able to sleep for 2 hours on the drive there and Maddie was able to enjoy gazing at the constellations on a perfectly dark cloudless nighttime sky (though with no “northern lights” activity) on our first stop before we reached Finland.

Below is the route we took—we got to the Finland border just around midnight and arrived back at Tromsø around 3am. But what is time when it’s completely dark outside 22 hours a day?

Of course, we all had visions of the spectacular photos you see when you picture the Northern Lights. Alas, that isn’t quite what we saw. When we got off the bus at the border, we could see low clouds, and above the clouds, a faint smudge of a light gray/ possibly green? light above the clouds—truly unimpressive, and worth making you wonder why you got off the warm bus when it was -15°C outside. But the CCD in the camera is much more sensitive than your eye, so when the guides took our photos, you do see a green halo on the horizon—success! Of course, Ada, as usual, wasn’t interested in getting her picture taken and Maddie, who was asleep on the bus when we reached the Finnish border, had to be practically dragged out of the bus to see the phenomenon. After cookies and hot chocolate and a brief attempt at building a fire by our guides, we all got back on the bus for the long 3 hour bus ride back to Tromsø.

I was glad we convinced Maddie to get out of the bus because after our trip, Maddie added the photos above to her school iPad and proudly showed her classmates the picture of us with the Northern Lights. Even though we were less than impressed, Maddie and Ada couldn’t stop talking about the Northern Lights and drew some pretty great pictures of themselves with the Northern Lights the next day as we took a break at the local library in Trømso.

Another highlight of our trip was a morning spent visiting reindeer and learning about Sami culture, the native people of Norway. We got to feed the reindeer—they would just walk right up to you and eat from the bucket of reindeer food.

Then we got to ride around the property on a real reindeer sled “Ho, Ho, Ho.”

After all of this, we gathered in a warm Sami tent for a traditional lunch of reindeer stew, and an explanation about Sami culture from one of the local Sami reindeer herders.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Tromsø is the weather. We went expecting it to be a record-setting cold that we’d remember for the rest of our lives, but in reality, temperatures were mostly right around freezing, and we spent a good deal of one day in our hotel room because of the heavy rain outside. Tromsø (and coastal Norway in general) are known to have a warmer climate that many other parts of the arctic due to the gulf stream, but watching heavy rain outside your window in early January above the arctic circle still feels a bit strange.

Speaking of hotel rooms, if you ever stay in a hotel in Norway, the “Scandic” hotel chain has an amazing breakfast buffet included in the price of your hotel room- lots of Norwegian knekke brød, fresh fish, Norwegian vaffles, pancakes, eggs of all sorts, an assortment of cheeses, fresh fruit, and even fresh orange juice.