We wrote this post while in-route to Seattle. We got up at 6am in Frankfurt, 9pm on Tuesday in Seattle. Getting to the airport was easy, we stayed overnight at the Sheraton at the airport and had but a fifteen minute walk to the terminal. The various lines (check-in, security, passport, etc.) were not too long. Frankfurt airport is so big that not all of the flights can pull right up to the terminal. Sometimes you get an ‘outside stand’. That means you ride a bus out to the plane and then climb stairs to get in it. It’s a lot of stairs with these big jets!

We got lucky somehow and they pulled us out of business class and moved us up to first class. The seats are a little bigger, the food is a lot better and they hover over you constantly. We also had our room upgraded last night at the hotel, so it’s been a bit of a bonus day 25 for us.

Twenty-five days is a long time. But we travel super-well together. We both love the quality time we get and we tend to enjoy the same things. So stress is low, enjoyment is high. It was a bit of an ambitious trip for us given the number of countries, currencies, languages and driving rules. Certainly others travel far more ambitiously than we do, but we are happy with how far we pushed ourselves this time.

We can’t wait to do it again, next year in the US and maybe in another two or three years again in Europe.

When we were in Germany three years ago, we got ‘schnitzel-ed out’ about three-quarters of the way through the trip. So this time we skipped the schnitzel; until tonight, when one of us ordered ‘Classic Wiener Schnitzel’ in the hotel restaurant. At first it tasted good, but half-way through, that schnitzeled out feeling returned. Apparently after three years, you need a little booster shot and then you are good for a while more.

The real news of the day is that we returned the car to the factory. It was pretty dirty after 21 days on the road. We’re not sure when we’ll see it again. It goes from the factory to the port where it will wait until they have a full boat-load. Then it sails to San Diego and gets trucked to WA. Last time it took about eight weeks.

Overall we drove 4,673 kilometers, or 2,897 miles. Compare that to our trip last year from Seattle to San Diego and back. That would have been 2,500 miles if we drove direct. It was 3,300 with all of our side-trips. As another comparison, it’s just over 3,000 from Seattle to Boston, by car.

We drove a total of 61 hours and 37 minutes. The car tracks all of this data for us. We got 21.4 mpg according to the car; our own data says we got 20.8 mpg. We had gas in the tank when we dropped off the car, so to Day 23’s fill-up, we used 119 gallons of gasoline at a total cost of $1,058. That’s $8.89 per gallon. While that seems really expensive, we once paid over $6 for half-liter bottles of water.

Here is a graph of mileage for the days we had the car:

The best drives were through the mountainous parts of Norway. Being above the tree line was amazing. The drive out of Flåm provided some amazing views of the fjords. We have a bunch of photos from both days on the Smugmug site. The drive from Copenhagen to Stockholm was great too in part because we came to realize how good the car is. It can really hammer on the Autobahn in Germany but crossing about 400 miles of Sweden showed how good a cruiser it is. We were quite fresh after seven hours of driving. The iPad/iPod integration is neat. The seats are really adjustable and comfortable. And they have fans to cool your buns while you drive!

There were a few niggling things the factory and/or dealer will have to tend to. But overall, it’s an awesome vehicle. We’re already planning a long drive in it in the US next summer.

After dropping off the car we took a taxi to the Leipzig airport. It’s a bit like the airport in Boise, overbuilt for the traffic it gets. It’s nice, just empty. The flight to Frankfurt was short, less than an hour. We kicked around the hotel and terminal for a while and are getting to bed early tonight so we can get out early in the AM for our flight home.

But the brake on her side of the car still does not work. Imagine that… Having driven in four countries, we still find the Germans are the best drivers. We left Copenhagen promptly at 9am so we could make the 11am ferry from Gedser, Demark to Rostock, Germany. Missing the boat would leave us with a two-hour wait at the ferry terminal. We made it with plenty of time to spare and had a chance to walk around in the sun for a while. As we’ve come south, the sun is out more and the weather is warmer.

The ferry is fun; we played Farkle and had lunch. We dumped most of our remaining Danish krone paying for the fare (almost $200) and then dumped the rest of the folding money on candy in the ship’s store. We have enough gummy bears (the good ones) to last a while!

Once back in Germany we hit the Autobahn. After driving through the nannie-states (Sweden and Norway with their speed cameras) it was fun to see this sign again:

That means, the restrictions no longer apply. In other words, no speed limit! There are lots of stretches of the Autobahn that do have speed limits plus it does get congested. But every so often, you just get to let the car unwind and go. We did a few stretches over 200 km/h (about 125 mph) but mostly we hovered around 180. You sure get to your destination quickly. (In 2008 we did some stretches at 250 km/h, but that was a different car…)

We had a mellow evening; we nibbled a little in the executive lounge at the hotel, sat in Starbucks for a while and watched a movie (Green Zone) on the TV. Tomorrow we start the trip home…

With the Midsummer holiday over, we saw signs of life in Växjö. But we left town anyway. It was our last day in Sweden. We had breakfast at the hotel and they had Swedish pancakes! They are so thin, about six or seven of them are only a quarter-inch thick. They are tasty!

We decided to take a rural route to Copenhagen. It was easy driving, very Connecticut-like. Norway is so rugged and Sweden has gentle rolling hills with lots of arable land. I’m sure it led to many differences between the two cultures, but having spent only two weeks in the two countries, we’re not sure what they are.

Now we’re in Denmark for one last night. The hotel here is really nice and it’s next to a mall. We were here two weeks ago and found everything closed for Sunday. It turns out the malls open on the first and fourth Sunday of each month. We had coffee at a café in the mall and did some reading on our iPads. We’re both reading Stieg Larsson novels (I’m on the first one, she’s on the third one). How cool is it to do that in Sweden (and Copenhagen?)

We only have three days in this whole trip where we have to get going early in the morning. Tomorrow is one of those days; it will be our second longest driving day as we head back to Germany. We need to make the 11am ferry if we want to get there in the late afternoon. But at least we’ll be back on the Autobahn!

We think we bought out last tank of gasoline today. We should have enough to make it the rest of the way. Overall, we’re at just over 20 mpg for the whole trip. Sweden has a gas station chain called Preem. They have a cute bear for a logo.

The prices are in SEK (Swedish krone) and that’s the cheapest gas we bought on the whole trip, a little less than eight dollars per gallon.

It’s just hard to imagine an American town deserted on an American holiday. Heck, if anything, stores open earlier! But here in Växjö, all is quiet. We had breakfast late and then took a leisurely drive into the ‘Kingdom of Crystal’ which is the local brand name for the area around Växjö where you find all manner of glass works, factories, showrooms and stores. And lo and behold, some of them were open!

Really good, really artful, really clever glass items are really cheap here. Shipping on the other hand, not so much. We can’t wait until the items we bought show up at home.

The whole region is glass-crazy. Check out this item in the middle of a round-about:

We visited three stores and then had a nice lunch is a small restaurant where the proprietor hand-made our salad and sandwich. It was delicious. Overall, it was a relaxing day.

Tomorrow we leave Sweden for the last time and head back to Denmark. We accumulated currencies during the first part of the trip, now we are trying to use them up.

We had a pretty easy drive today, mostly motorways and whatever they would call a parkway. As we got closer to Växjö we started to notice that the stores seemed closed. And there were no cars parked in any of the parking lots at the businesses we passed. And when we got into the town, it was deserted.

It turns out that today and tomorrow are a big-time summer holiday, called Mid-Summer, where EVERYONE takes off for the country. Everything is closed. So much for doing our research! We had planned to tour some of the glass works the region is known for. We’ll spend some time tonight researching places that might be open tomorrow. And if we find nothing, maybe we’ll go for a drive.

With all the restaurants in town closed, the hotel serves dinner tonight and tomorrow. And… wait for it… they have Swedish Meatballs!

Tonight we are in Sarpsborg, Norway. It’s the kind of place you stay when you decide the distance from point A (Flåm, Norway) to point B (Växjö, Sweden) is too far to make in one day of driving. So we split it into two days of about 450 km (280 miles) each. We decided to take a scenic route today and saw some amazing sights.

Like this:

And this:

And this:

As we did on Monday driving to Bergen, we went well above the tree line and saw snow. Plus tons of sheep roaming around. See Smugmug for their photo.

Finally, two photos of the really gigantic ship we saw in Flåm. It was so big (over 1,000 feet long) I could not get a shot of the whole thing up close with the camera we have.

In town:

And leaving for Bergen and beyond:

Mother Nature dwarfs even the largest man-made objects.

Tonight is our last day in Norway. We will have spent one-third of our time here. We really liked Norway a lot. The people are friendly, they all speak great English and the whole country is gluten-free friendly. The scenery is amazing. It took our breath away at every turn. It’s been hard to cull the photos down to just twenty or so.

The people of Norway are ambitious and imaginative. The country is so rugged it really took a special breed of people to tame it. But they did. As you drive around you see the awesome power of water as it flows from the tops of the mountains, into the fjords and out to sea. The Norwegians have harnessed this power building hydro-electric plants everywhere they can and stringing wires over some really inhospitable terrain. In doing so, they created a standard of living that is among the highest in the world.

Their imagination comes across in projects like the spiral tunnel or the Oslo Opera House. Even ordinary road features like bridges, ramps and even signs often show creative flare.

It’s been a great eight days.

Actually it’s pronounced more like Flome. It’s a really tiny town at the end of a really big fjord. When we arrive there was a massive cruise ship tied up at the, um, side of town. The big ocean going cruise ships are really tall, as in maybe taller than a fifteen story building. So this ship towered over the town. But it was also longer than the town and I think wider too. Did I say the town was really tiny? And the ship was really big?

Anyway, we took a boat-load (couldn’t resist) of pictures but will have to post them tomorrow. While the hotel advertises that they have Internet, they do not. So we are sitting in the train station where I picked up their wireless to write this post.

We had a short drive today, less than 200 km and less than three hours. We were in some long tunnels under some big mountains; one tunnel was over 11 km, or about seven miles. It gets a little creepy after a while.

It’s another great day weather-wise and the hotel is really nice (other than the Internet.) But there is not much to do here after you watch the really big ship depart the really tiny town. So we’re doing a quick email catch-up and blog post and then going to dinner at Norway’s only restaurant in a converted rail car.

We have a long driving day tomorrow as we make up about a quarter of the distance back to Leipzig. We’ll be in a more modern hotel we think; we’ll post some pictures of Flåm then.

It’s almost midnight and it’s not really dark yet here in Bergen. The sun is behind the fort at the west end of downtown but you can still read a book on the sidewalk. We just got back in from a short walk to check out the late night Summer Solstice scene. There are lots of people walking around, taking photos of the sunset and the bars are mostly full. A few minutes ago one of the massive cruise ships in the harbor bellowed it horns and pulled away, no doubt with passengers lining the rails to watch the sun set.

Bergen is the second largest city in Norway, but at 250K people, it’s a small town on the American scale. We were able to walk almost all of downtown in two separate outings. The highlight was riding the Fløibanen, a funicular, up to the top of Fløyen Mountain. It’s a fun, quick ride and the view at the top is spectacular.

The plateau on Fløyen is a total tourist trap. It was interesting to be thrown in with tourists from other countries. Bergen at the Summer Solstice brings in people from all over. The town is packed and you hear a wide variety of accents. We’ve all heard the term ugly-American to describe boorish tourists from our country. In general the Americans seem more polite and better behaved than people from some of the European countries. We won’t go into details…

Tomorrow we begin the trip back home. We have a short drive tomorrow to a town at the head of one of the larger fjords. From now on we average about 300 miles a day except for one extra (non-driving) day we have planned in Sweden.