After a couple of hours of sleep, we got up, packed our things, and drove to Keflavik. Along the way, I saw the northern lights again - that faint grey light brushed across the night sky. It was a nice parting sight - especially since it was a full moon (which makes it more difficult to see the aurora borealis).
Dropping off the car was painless, though they only had one person working in the wee hours of the morning, so we had to wait until he was free to shuttle us to the airport.
At the airport, we used the self-serve kiosks to print our boarding passes and baggage tags, then dropped off our checked luggage before heading to security. There, we ran into trouble - Jeff's contact solution was in a 120mL bottle, and they refused to make an exception even for medical supplies, so he had to leave it behind. I also forgot to take a souvenir jar of jam out of our carry-on bag, so we lost that as well. Annoying, but not the end of the world.
We used our remaining time at KEF to pick up new souvenirs, eat some breakfast, and fill up our water bottle before boarding. The boarding was also interesting - since the plane was parked on the tarmac, they just had everyone go through boarding at the same time to get on buses that were waiting by. Well, I should say they only had one bus going to and from the airplane, so they tried to throttle the flow of passengers by only processing one person at a time (each person just scanned their own boarding pass). It still resulted in a bottleneck since everyone was ready but there was only one bus.
The Icelandair flight to Stockholm was fairly quick - under 3 hours - enough to catch up a bit on sleep. When we did have our eyes open, I noticed that there were lights along the ceiling of the plane, emulating the northern lights with hues of green, blue, and yellow. Nice touch.
At Stockholm, the Arlanda Express train was very convenient to get from the airport to Stockholm city. We bought our tickets online, so we were able to just take the elevator to the train platform after picking up our luggage - really easy. Within Stockholm Central Station, we tried unsuccessfully to find a SIM card that wasn't overly expensive, so we just grabbed lunch at one of the many food stalls. Once we had food in our tummies, I ventured out of the train station to a Telia store to get a SIM card (they were able to give me 2GB for 249 SEK) and also managed to find contact solution at an optical store.
With our problems seemingly solved, we headed to the train platform to wait for our train to Göteborg. That's when we heard the announcement that there was an accident causing delays of all trains between Stockholm and Göteborg. As other passengers rushed to check how their departures were affected, we found that our train wasn't cancelled but would be delayed. Whew, at least we weren't stuck in Stockholm!
It was a pretty smooth train ride overall - with a delay of only 34 minutes on top of a 3-hour trip. Much more pleasant than a 6-hour drive! Göteborg Central Station was bright and welcoming and our walk to the hotel showed us that Sweden is much more populated than Iceland! Bigger downtown with more lights, more shops, more restaurants, more everything.
The hotel staff were very easygoing and friendly, and our room turned out to be huge! Big enough to sleep 4 people, with bunk beds in the corner. Since it was getting late, we headed out for dinner before we got too comfortable - to Källarkrogen, a recommendation from the receptionist. The meal was delicious - something like home-cooked Swedish food, with butter-baked cod and a patty made of deer meat for main dishes, finishing with apple cake and ice cream for dessert. I also tried a raspberry blueberry cider - light, refreshing and a treat after all that traveling.
A stroll around downtown was a perfect end to a long day. Tomorrow we'll get to sleep in, and maybe try the breakfast at the hotel depending on when we get up.
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