(by Maria)

Anyone who’s traveled with me one of the many times I’ve had to run through the terminal as my name is being paged over the loud speaker knows that arriving at the airport three hours early is not my style. But this is what we decided on, a bit of a compromise, as Chris wanted to arrive four hours early. Even though Norwegian Air allows you to pay to check a bike, and we paid for four, Chris was nervous that they might not make it on the plane unless we were the first ones there.

And it’s true, when we showed up at the check-in counter with four bike boxes, the gate agents looked a little startled. “That’s a lot of bikes,” one of them said.

Our neighbor drove us to the airport in our minivan. I got a text from the airline the morning of, saying the flight was delayed, but we left according to plan, as being in the house was just making us more nervous. We’re renting it out this summer and I could endlessly find more to work on if I’m in it.

We left on time and had over an hour to kill because of the delay, so we ended up at our neighbor’s husband’s annual company picnic for lunch. It was a totally random, strange, perfect way to leave the country. In typical Silicon Valley style, this company party was over the top, with carnival rides, live music, food vendors, and a beer garden. The kids played, Chris and I had a beer, and we all ate and hung out. Our neighbors have become good friends, so it was great to spend our last hour with them before we left.

Our neighbor dropped us at the curb with our boxes and a few of us hung with our things at one spot while Chris moved them, one by one, to the check-in line, where someone else waited at that end. After we got checked in and watched the bike boxes get searched and loaded, we made our way to the gate with several bright panniers as carry-ons, our bike helmets clipped on to our bags. Chris and I had debated for months over whether to let the kids brings their iPad minis on the trip and when the delay went on to for over two hours, I was already glad that we did.

It was during the first delay of the trip that I slipped into what will become a necessary mode to not go crazy, here: hang-out-mode. Since we had nothing waiting for us on the other side, it didn’t matter when we got there. “Late” isn’t really even a thing when you have no plans, so we didn’t pay attention to how long the delay was or when we finally ended up leaving. It was a couple hours, anyway. I really just didn’t pay attention or care.

Other than the delay, the flight was seriously great, one of the best I’ve had. It was on a new plane, with technology I hadn’t seen before, like windows that dimmed with the push of a button. The kids loved it. They settled into their spaces, fiddled with the knobs and buttons (accidentally calling a flight attendant, of course), and ate the meal. S said “It’s like we’re having dinner with a ton of strangers.”

It was a 9-hour flight (not 12, as I had been saying) and everyone but me slept on cue. I used to be a flight attendant and had Boston-Amsterdam as a regular route, but the sky outside for this route, Oakland-Stockholm, was like nothing I’ve ever seen. We flew into the sunset and it was dark for maybe two hours, but as we went through Canada and over Greenland, the sky lightened and cycled through colors that reminded me of dye for Easter Eggs. Everyone sleeping missed it, but for a while it was blood-red outside. Then it changed so that, on one side of the plane, it was a teal blue and the other side was violet purple. As we got closer to Sweden, it changed to the orange and yellow of sunrise and after flying through a night where it hardly got dark, it was day.

We arrived around 2:00 pm in Sweden (it’s a nine hour time difference, so we basically lost a night of sleep) and found our bikes waiting on a cart for us right near the baggage carousel. It took Chris much longer to put the bikes together than we thought it would: he worked slowly and carefully, on jet-lag and a few hours sleep. The kids were total champs. We’d talked to them about the time-change and jet-lag and they seemed prepared for how loopy they would feel. They all got sleep on the plane, the youngest getting the most, so this helped.

While Chris put the bikes together, the kids played on their iPads and I repacked the panniers. It took somewhere around four hours before we were rolling out of the airport. It was 6:00 pm in Sweden and I had been awake since 4:30 am the day before: well over 24 hours. Thank God the placed we’d booked to stay our first night was only 4.7 miles away. We pushed our bikes right out of the revolving doors of the airport and rode to Malsta, Sweden.

Let the peddling begin.