It was a complete miracle, too. Travis says I must have hit a bus full of nuns. The week before, when I was supposed to be doing laundry for six (mostly CHECK) and cleaning out the fridge (CHECK) and making arrangements for four boys to spend six days with two sets of willing grandparents (CHECK and THANKS!) and pack winter clothes (CHECK-YAY!) and arrange for the dog to go to boot camp (CHECK)? Well, I ended up with a kidney stone on Friday morning, then Tal went off with Norman & Brenda and Travis went off to run a half-marathon in Virginia (I keep asking if he can't run here in Florida?) and I'm recovering with the three little boys. And influenza sets in. Three days of 104 fever. While I'm recovering. Well, on Sunday morning Riley walked Oddjob and decided to swing, and Oddjob got excited and knocked him out, and moments later I'm packing the kids in the truckster to go back to the ER for five staples in his sweet little red head. It took all week for us to recover, and it was a close one. Mike G, Katie, and Morgan came to help us out at the ER, and at one point Mom announced that she wasn't leaving me alone again. It was that bad.

But here we are, safely on the plane, iPads loaded up with TeeVee! Ended up using 5% per show, which is awesome. Sleep chairs look incredible, but feel like metal torture chambers when extended. All the puff disappears. The Passport Control agent stamped Travis' passport and said, "Welcome. Bond, Meeester Bond." It was the least amount of security I've seen when entering a country--a little scary. We just acted like we belonged and headed out.

So when you cross time zones, sleep comes first. We checked into our hotel and slept for six hours. After my pre-trip ordeal, it was beyond blissful. We woke up in time for dinner, and walked across the street to Fiat, a little Italian place on the Nyhavn canal. We were looking at the restaurant next door, but some people eating outside told us Fiat is much better. Everyone spoke English and gave us a gazillion tips about the city. We couldn't believe how nice everyone was! I couldn't believe how much I loved the chocolate fig cake. I already have the ingredients ready here at home. Who knew--figs!

Here is Nyhavn in the morning--beautiful! These buildings are so old and pretty. We walked around the corner to a little American-ish breakfast place (Travis has to have eggs!) and I spotted the changing of the guards on their way to the palace! I snapped a quick picture, and wouldn't you know there is a trash truck and a 7-11 in the shot? Lovely. It was fun to see it, though.

Breakfast was great--we were the only people in the place, and the guy was awesome. We chatted with him, downloaded the music he was playing, and were generally perplexed about the 89 kroner breakfast prices. We never did quite figure out the money.

First and foremost: I didn't notice until I was posting this that the picture came out with Travis standing under a Toilet sign. Fantastic.

You can't miss the ten gazillion tour boats with open tops. The cruise ships come in here and the people come out by the ton and I guess they all take the little tour and hop back on the ships. The tour operator spoke several different languages fluently--one of the most impressive things about Denmark was the flawless English. The guy at breakfast said that the younger generation is losing that ability because they are spending all their time on Facebook. Ha! I can say we were relieved--even menus had English printed for us. We only had one language snafu, but more on that later.

The highlight of the tour was when we went through the next town over, Christianshavn (or as a guy on the train said, Christian Shaven?) So apparently the town was originally inhabited with sailors, and our guide described it as being full of "very, very loose women and beeeeg alcohol." We split a gut over that one. The town is just beautiful now, and we even spotted a boat from Hilton Head, NC. Most of the boats were sailboats, and there were lots of teeny tiny boats. Travis kept looking for performance boats, and then we remembered that gas is $9 (or something--we are still mixed up about the kroner) over there. We tried imagining filling up our guzzler and got chills.

We were bundled up and still nearly froze to death--what a great break from this Florida heat!!!

Since Copenhagen is mostly situated on the water, the canal trip lets you see most of the highlights in an hour, and you get a good idea of the city's layout. We were moving when I took these, but they were kind of fun. The first picture is a church spire that has the steps on the outside--you can walk up to the top on the exterior and see most of the city.

The second picture is in Nyhaven and is Hans Christian Anderson's house. We brought back the English version of his collection for the kids. No sense being too realistic.

The third building here is really, really old. Their history is so neat. This is the Parliament building. The spire thing there has three dragons with intertwined tails. Kind of disgusting, but I thought the kids would like the picture. The girl in the foreground is the beeeeeg alcohol guide.

I promise this is the end of the tourist nonsense. We really had so much fun and talked about this (And. Not. Work.) the whole time we were there. First photo is a swan nest. I've never seen one, or really even thought about one before. It was huge. Apparently it is their national bird. There were swans swimming around us.

Next to it is the Black Diamond, a national library, and then the opera house. There are so many Scandinavian modern buildings juxtaposed against the old village ones. There was one building nearby that was pretty one one side and didn't even have windows on the other side, because the king could only see the one side from the palace, and didn't care what the other side looked like. We also passed Noma, what is called the best restaurant in the world. Since it is a seafood restaurant, Travis wasn't interested.

Bottom left is the Amalienborg palace. We also walked by the street side of it later in the day. It is kind of slammed right into the city, but the water side is pretty. We passed by the royal yacht, too. I was surprised how it was just sitting out in the open. You know the US Presidential yacht location is probably kept in a military base. We passed by a military boat called the Oops, because it apparently set off a bomb that took out some summer homes.

We went under some bridges that were SO LOW that we had to duck all the way down in our seats. It was crazy!

1. Primary goal is to get some unique Legos for the kids.
2. Lego factory is way too far for our short trip.
3. We shopped until we dropped for at least Legos with Danish markings.
4. All Legos around the world apparently look EXACTLY THE SAME. As in, I'll just pick something up at Target.

Next to our hotel was the Stroget, the big pedestrian shopping street. I pronounce this STROH-get. Danes pronounce it sah-teh-air-row-gah-ah-eh-uh-ah-ih-uh-gah-uh-uh-ih-eh-oh-tah. How they multiply syllables? Is beyond me. Had to show the kids that GameStop fever has spread everywhere. Behind the Lego Woody? Is a store full of (expensive) English Lego sets that look the same as the one at Toys R Us. I was not a happy camper.

But I have been to the country where Legos are bjorn.

This is a typical Bondism. We had to daisy chain our electronics to charge them up. Electronics were fabulous the entire trip. Travis surprised me with an iPad before we left!!! We got hooked on Fringe (new TeeVee show that is kind of an X-Files, for those who aren't sci-fi geeks), so we downloaded them on iTunes and split them between our iPads. Then we put a splitter on our noise-cancelling headphones (which were also charging here) so we could watch together. Watched on the flight to Atlanta, then watched NON-STOP on our nine-hour flight to Denmark. The amazing report is that each show only burned 5% of battery power. This is awesome.

We only had service on the iPhones, so we could talk to the kids daily. Only one emergency call--an invitation to Scout camping--and we even got text photo updates on Oddjob's boot camp progress. He did awesome, by the way. I took a picture of Travis' phone here to show the Telenor DK service. You can tell that it is Travis' phone because there are 180 unread emails and 40 unread IMs. Heh heh. I'm sure the Facebook app is just there for research purposes.

Oh, he got the Apple Bluetooth keyboard and set it up with the little stand in the Crown Room (or whatever they call it this week. He really was able to fly on it. And passing through security without taking it out of the bag? LOVE. They don't have it in DK yet, so we had to haul it out both ways in Customs. But still love it for travel.

That is our pretty white hotel there. The circle is the Kongens Nytorv, where the Royal Theater and Nyhavn canal all come together.

One of the neat things about Copenhagen is that 37-40% (I saw both figures) of the population use bikes as their primary form of transportation! We just got new bikes, so I was super excited. They are mostly the cruiser bikes that I so badly wanted (I had to get a fitness bike so I can attempt to keep up with Travis), and they look so traditional and neat. Now, they do not ride them in a traditional way--they are SCARY aggressive. We got caught in bike lanes a couple times and almost got taken out.

We saw old people, people in suits, people in dresses riding on the sides of their bikes, people walking bikes on pedestrian streets, bikes with baskets, bikes with big carts to haul groceries, you name it. I'd love to live where I could get around on my own power. Now Tal and I are going to the gym on our bikes--but I don't think we're going to attempt Dale Mabry.

Oh, and all the babies were in prams.

The reason for our trip was that Travis had committed to speak at a conference--for a whopping forty minutes! This happened on Wednesday, so we had the day cleared for that. It went well, although it wasn't a very jovial crowd. We met some nice people and were invited back for a dinner.

The dinner was back in Nyhavn, at Kong Hans. It is allegedly the oldest house in Copenhagen, and the restaurant was originally the cellar. It was a little odd walking into it, but then stunning. We sat in front of that strange tree thing. They served pheasant eggs, strange smoked salmon on boards under glass--lots of pomp for two little bites!, then OX. There was something next to it that may have been marrow, and that was kind of it for me. Thankfully, I recovered in time for the chocolate.

The most interesting part of the dinner was the company. Apparently in Europe it is okay to talk about religion & politics at dinner. The Holocaust has been removed from their textbooks, and so many other forms of free speech have been revoked. I suppose we have lost free speech on the other end of the spectrum. The older I get, the more I realize how important it is to understand history in order to shape our future. One of our dinner partners was the founder of the International Free Press Society, and while some of his ideas may seem radical, I remember that it was a bunch of extremists who came to America and gave us the freedom we have now.

Denmark's taxes are over 50%, plus 25% sales tax on all products & services. Yuck.

I took this picture at...10:30 pm!!! It got light at 4:00 am. The jet lag really never wore off. They said that there is one day in the summer where it stays light all night, and during the winter they only have four hours of light a day. That would do me in. We were eating dinner and couldn't figure out why they were taking down all the chairs & tables--had no idea it was after 10:00!!!

It is spring there, and cooooold. 50 degrees in the daytime. Loved the break, but couldn't deal with it all the time. The restaurants had outdoor seating with little heaters and blankets on all the chairs. I took the picture below late at night (because who knew what time it was!) and cracked up when the flash caught the bike rims.

The hotel was so pretty, I kept taking pictures of it. The global climate conference (whatever) conference is held here. It was built 250 years ago and was occupied by the Nazis during WWII. And we found an Internet deal that was half the price of the conference hotel, and this area ended up being so much more fun for exploring. Every time we went out, we just stopped and asked the doorman where to go, where to eat, or whatever. And everything was so close, he'd usually just point.

Esther, please notice that I am wearing black. Gotta love my tourist sneakers.

I'm posting this picture first, because Travis looks happy and relaxed. And that is how I'd like to remember Sweden. We were told to take the metro to the airport, then the train to Malmo. The group excursions weren't available on the days we were there, so we had to go on our own. We got to the metro and things fell apart. In Europe, the credit card machines require a PIN, not just for check cards. We finally got some tickets and went down to the subway, and there the English translating stopped. And yellow/green lines became M1/M2, but not really, because they switched every two seconds, and we didn't figure it out for about an hour. So we were looking at the map, but we kept passing this Udgang station over and over. After I don't know how long, we found out that Udgang means Exit in Danish. Seriously. Then I remembered that my Dad played some Luftwaffe game when I was little, so the Luftsomething stop must be the airport. We ended up out in the 'burbs first, but we did make it.

Same problem with the train tickets, then we got them. When we were in the train station (very cool at the airport, if you know what you're doing), it doesn't even have the word TRACK in English. It is Tog, by the way. And your destination may have a stop, which confuses where you're going. And the Tog where we were? Says Do Not Board Here. Okay. And my husband decided that Sweden wasn't a good idea, but I got desperate for a Sweden stamp on my passport (and if not the stamp, then the experience). It was the only stressor of the entire trip. We didn't know where to get off exactly, what to expect in the town, how exactly to get back, and Travis' phone wasn't getting service.

We had a lovely dinner, explored the town, and took an uneventful, early train back before dark. It was a great experience after all :).

We had dinner at Gozzip (assuming that is Swedish for Gossip!) and took pictures of cute Travis with the pretty village in the background. And this McDonald's (alltid oppet = always open?) is for Dad.

I'm mostly a candid family shot taking mama, but I saw this and flipped. The sun was just right for the modern glass building to reflect the pretty details of the older building next to it. I couldn't believe what I was seeing as we approached it. Okay, maybe it isn't extraordinaire, but I still think it is neato.

One last shot of the last night. We had a perfect week, even slept until noon one day. After being so sick, it was exactly what I needed. I came home to backed-up work, backed-up plumbing, and more dumb luck...Travis is convinced I hit a bus full of nuns. I am not sure what happened, but I am sure that this will carry me over for a long time.

Thank you to Mom & Dad, and Norman & Brenda, for holding down the fort full of kiddos. Now that we know it CAN be done...

Just kidding. Thanks for the adventure.