Our days started bright eyed and bushy tailed at 6:15am to jump in the taxis that were there at the hostel to bring us to the airport. It was about a 40-minute car ride so nothing too crazy, when we got to the airport and all checked in at the self-check-in booth, it was time to roll the dice on the weight of my checked bag. One of my classmates brought along her baggage scale, but when I used it after the bag was packed, I got a range of weight from 46-53 pounds. To say I was praying for the 46 to be correct would be an understatement. When I set it on the scale there was a message in Swedish that popped up and it was flashing 23 kg so I assumed that I was overweight, but thankfully the Scandinavian airlines worker was the Real MVP and manually bypassed the message. Score! The next hurdle was to get through security. I have to say, I have never seen an estimated wait time say two minutes for a security checkpoint in my life, but sure enough it was about two minutes and I was walking through the metal detector.

Once we all got to the other side of the security, we had about an hour to grab coffee, food, or relax for a bit. We jumped on a flight at 8:30am to Stockholm which is about a 50-minute flight. It was a medium full flight, but I lucked out and only had one other person in my row, and it was a three-seat row. We got to chatting on the flight about where we were both headed, I told her about our last 12 days in Gothenburg, where she lives, and she is a manager of a dispatch center for emergency services and was flying to Stockholm for an afternoon meeting.

When we landed, we had to hustle over to the shuttle to bring us to our connecting flight’s gate. We made it to the terminal and got through passport control just as they were calling the last boarding for our flight to O’Hare, so if you have ever seen the Home Alone scene where the whole family is running through the airport, that’s kind of how it felt getting to our connecting flight.

The best part is this flight is about 40% full so we have plenty of room on the flight to spread out and get some shuteye or get some work done. We took off and cruised for roughly eight hours, landed in Chicago, took a bus back to Carthage, and then I made the 6-hour trek back to Minnesota to try and reset my body clock before the second semester of classes starts up on February 5th. This has been a wonderful trip, and all the credit goes to Professor JJ Shields, his wife Susie, and Retired Professor Jan Owens for organizing and managing this trip to ensure that we had the most enjoyable time in Sweden and that all of our activities ran as smooth as they did! Hats off to them and all the businesses that we were able to visit and learn from. This was truly a trip of a lifetime and I am counting down the days until I can return to Gothenburg.

Takeaways

• Taking to seat neighbors on flights is a different kind of an adventure
• Make sure that layovers are spaced out enough to have plenty of time to get through passport control and get to your gate
• Adjusting to time zones is much easier going West is much easier to adjust to than going East