This trip takes us to Sweden where we will visit family and enjoy the Scandinavian environs. Then we head on to the UK to visit my cousin in Leicester. From there we fly to Crete, ferry to Santorini, fly to Athens. Then we fly to Sri Lanka for a couple of weeks of touring and safaris before we return home.
The first leg, Melbourne to Sweden was tiring. The flight went via Bangkok and the plane was full. The current pro-democracy unrest in Hong Kong led to a shutdown of the airport so lots of people ended up taking flights with alternate airlines that did not go via HK, filling up any available seats.
In Bangkok we had a 3.5 h wait for our next flight. Fortunately it is a massive building so we got a little exercise on our walk to the next departure gate, and luckily we found a stretch of seats where some form of horizontality was possible.
Alas, the queue at immigration in Stockholm airport was very, very slow and by the time we had got out, the direct bus to Vasteras had gone. The next departure went via Stockholm through building morning peak hour traffic, adding an hour to the travel time. Not what we wanted. We’d assumed there were regular direct buses, but the system has changed since our last visit, and there are now fewer buses and some, as we found, take the circuitous route via the city centre.
We were very glad to get to Västerås and relax.
We used Dazzling Tours, and highly recommend them. They provided sound advice, a car and chauffeur (Nalaka, who was fantastic), picked us up at the airport when we arrived, dropped us at the airport at the end, and made sure everything in between was smooth and stress-free.