Home Sweet Home

I came home to this; Blueberries and pea pods and the first tomato out of my garden.

It is so nice to sit down at the laptop to type. No Scandinavian or Samsung keyboard on the smarty pants phone deciding to change words. No tiny screen to squint at.
I can correct my posts easier on the laptop too. Not so easy on the phone.
Just the usual Blogger and its terribly usual idiosyncrasies.

Attempting to radically change time zones here today. We arrived at PDX late last night and ended up taking son back to Corvallis because he had to be at work today at 8am. Which meant, we arrived home in the wee hours of the morning.
We only slept a few hours when the morning light woke us. Now we are attempting to stay up until almost our usual bedtime. I don't know which is more difficult - going to or coming home -- dealing with jetlag.

I have to go back to work tomorrow so I am trying to organize vacation photos. I will probably put together a slide show to post this weekend and then get back to the regularly scheduled summer events around here.

What did I like best about Sweden & Finland?
1. 30 years since I was an exchange student to Finland went by fast. Seeing my host families and friends again was awesome.
2. Internet. To stay in touch but it also made this trip amazing.
3. Trains 'on time'. It takes less than a minute to load and unload passengers at stops, then the train goes. The train waits for no man. Seriously. In America, we spend more than 30 minutes trying to get people on & off the train -at one stop! No wonder no one rides them here.
4. The sheer number of airplanes in Sweden.
5. Castles. yadayadayada. Eight foot thick stone walls always make great photos.
6. Friendly people - everywhere we went.
7. The summer weather - so like the Willamette valley here in Oregon. That small touch of coastal humidity. To make my hair curl.
8. Having friends to stay with some of the time instead of hotels. My auto-immune thanks them.
9. Discovering six second cousins of my husbands in Mariehamn.
10. I might have become addicted to the afternoon coffee time in Sweden.