USA - Part 1 - Canton (14th - 16th June)

Our big holiday of 2016 was a trip to the United States.  We had two main destinations in mind - visiting family in Michigan and Canton was the main purpose of the trip and secondly we were going to stop by Orlando, Florida to visit Disney and Universal Studios.

Our flight left from Copenhagen airport at 6:30am and we were required to be there 2 hours before the flight - 4:30am.  There were no buses running to the train station at that time of night, so we drove to Triangeln Station and had a friend pick up the car at a more reasonable time and drop it home.

We got up at 2am and caught the train around 3:30am.  When we got to the airport, all of the check-in gates were closed.  We needed to check our luggage but the gates didn't open until 5:30am so we had to wait around until we could check the bags in and get our tickets - turns out we could have had another hour or two sleep in....  In order to ensure that we didn't sleep through any alarms, I stayed up all night and Kris snuck a couple of hours disrupted napping.

The first flight was short - Copenhagen to Frankfurt, Germany (about an hour) and we had enough time to get through customs and get to our gate before our next flight from Frankfurt to Toronto (8 hours).  We arrived in Toronto at 1pm Eastern Canadian/American time (7pm Swedish time) and waited until just before our planned flight time at 4pm to find out that our flight to Cleveland was delayed.  It turns out that the aircraft hadn't arrived.

The flight was to be 39 minutes, so our Aunt and Uncle had already left their house in Canton, Ohio to pick us up from Cleveland Airport when we got the notification of the delay.  By this point the adults had been up for about 36hours so we were all pretty tired and the kids were also running on little sleep.

Tomas was pretty tired

Eventually the plane arrived but we were then delayed again as they had a mechanical problem with the aircraft so they needed to resolve that. An hour and a half later we were told that there were two options - either they fixed the mechanical issues in the next hour, or they needed to put us on an alternative flight in 2 hours time.  They managed to find an alternative plane quicker than expected, but then there were delays because the crew had to be replaced (they had exceeded their safe flight time) and then another delay because they needed to redo the flight plans.

In the end we were almost 3 hours delayed for a 39 minute flight and our poor relatives were stuck waiting at the airport for us.  We eventually arrived in Cleveland at 7:30pm and meet Aunt Penny and Uncle Dave.

While we were waiting for the bags, Tomas curled up on the floor of the terminal on his Ollie dragon from Legoland and fell asleep.  We carried him and the bags out to the car and started the hour trip to Canton.

When we arrived we met our cousins and their children and stayed up chatting for a few more hours. When we finally went to sleep I had been awake from about 48hours, but it was great to meet everyone and finally reach our destination.

The following night we were in for a big surprise - Fireflies or Lightning Bugs.  These little bugs light up at dark and looked almost like Christmas lights.  The family had a laugh watching two grown adults (Kris and I) chasing the glowing bugs around the yard.

Kris' Lightning Bug

We had a couple of days in Canton before heading up to Saginaw, Michigan to meet the rest of our family.