One year ago today....

Exactly 365 days ago today we arrived in Sweden. God that was a long day. Myself, Carl, the two dogs, their crates and all of our luggage in a rented van on a late afternoon drive from Ottawa to Montreal to catch our flight. Checking in and getting the dogs crated, dropping off the rental van, paying for excess baggage and the dogs, going through security with the dogs (as they have to step out of the kennels, be checked over with the wand, the kennels go through xray and so on and so on). Because of time I did this while Carl returned the van. Honestly it was one of the most stressful 60 minutes or so of my life. 


Once all that was done, I don't recall much else until I was sitting on the jet. I know we must have eaten something. I know we were tired. We could not stay in our house as everything was packed and on a truck at a warehouse already so we stayed in a hotel. We got up early, went back to the house and cleaned it the best we could. We then had to go drop off our car at the warehouse so it could be shipped over, dropped of keys to the house to the rental agency, then on the road to Montreal. 


Once all was settled and we were on the plane I just kept fretting about the dogs as they had never been in kennels that much before. We had done a lot of prep work about 3 months out to get them used to the kennels but they still weren't crazy about them. Lufthansa was great though, the flight attendant found us to let us know that the dogs made it on board with no issues before take off, and they even came up and said that they must be fine as if the dogs bark in the hold they can usually hear them in the galley. I was hoping they were asleep in the dark, they were. 

The flight was fine, except my personal entertainment unit failed at my seat. Not the end of the world as I had a book and my ipod with me but I still got an in flight credit (which I still have not used - I should look and see if it is still valid). We landed in Munich and we knew that in Frankfort you could actually request to see the dogs, but in Munich the way the airport was laid out we couldn't. We had a few hours of layover and we were both pretty exhausted (see below).

Ah, lovely aren't we? After what seemed like a day-and-a-half layover in Munich (where we at least ran into our friend Ken) we were on the flight for Stockholm. We could see the dog's crates being loaded and we saw movement so we were relieved. 

We finally landed in Stockholm, and we knew that the Ambassador was planning on meeting us at the airport, though I had no idea she would be standing at the end of the jetbridge. I'm sure looking like we did we made a lovely first impression. 

Once we got our luggage, we waited for the dogs at oversized baggage but we could not let them out of the kennel until we cleared customs. There was someone in line in front of us with something that looked like a hunting rifle with a sight on it and I swear the customs officer was on the phone about this for 10 minutes or so. When it was our turn we handed him the paperwork, had to bring the dogs out of the kennels so he could scan their microchips to make sure they matched the paperwork and we were on our tired, but merry way. It seemed to us that the customs officer was more baffled by the gun than the dogs. All in all from landing to exiting the airport with the dogs was about 45 minutes. I was impressed. 

The dogs were finally let out of their kennels briefly after about 16 hours and they happily found a patch of grass. Back into the kennels, not very willingly for the drive to the house. We finally arrived and once the Ambassador and the rest of the team left we were here. All four of us fell asleep on the bed in a lump, but we were here in Stockholm.