After two and a half years it was time to say goodbye to Sweden and Malmö. We really enjoyed our stay and made heaps of new friends. My company in Sweden had asked if I could stay longer (and Kris' work had asked to keep her too), but work in Australia needed us back for a new project.
To say goodbye, we organised a goodbye picnic and BBQ, spread over two days. The first day we had friends from both my and Kristine's work and I cooked up some hamburgers on the BBQ (without making a huge fire this time). We had a great time and my work gifted us with some Swedish shirts and hats marked with the submarine project numbers.
The second day we had all of the kids friends over and had a crazy day with a massive water balloon fight.
After the party it was time to get serious about the move. We'd been starting to sort all of our gear for a while, working out what we wanted to take back to Australia, and what we would donate or give away. We had removalists coming to take our freight and, after that, everything left needed to either fit in our suitcases or be left behind. Our furniture was owned by my work, so that would be donated - either to friends or to charity, but all the souvenirs, board games, toys, clothes, bedding, bikes, soccer goals etc etc needed to be sorted.
One week before we were scheduled to leave we moved into a temporary accommodation - a hotel near the kids school. We had been informed that we were able to take 6m3 of sea freight and 1m3 of air freight. They checked out our pile of stuff and informed us that we had about 11m3 (I was a bit dubious as they added a box for pretty much everything - "pillow, that's a box. Book, that's a box", but it wasn't looking good for fitting it all in. They offered for us to take the full amount as sea freight only instead of taking air freight for no change in cost. Air freight would be likely to arrive at the same time we did (we were doing some travel first), but sea freight would get there about a month and a half later (late August). We didn't see that we had much choice though, so we booked it all to go by sea. We did manage to reduce to total amount to 9m3, but we ended up repacking and reweighing our suitcases multiple time to make sure everything else would fit.
Our big problem was the way we'd decided to return home. Instead of taking a nice easy flight straight back to Aus, I decided to take long service leave and have a good trip to finish off. The first weekend I had an Old Boys rugby tour to Glasgow, Kris and the kids were going to follow and then we'd head off on Sunday and fly to Orlando to visit Disney World for a week. After that, we'd head up to Ohio and Michigan to visit family and the fly out of Ohio to head home. This meant that we needed to make sure we could take our huge amount of luggage on all the flights. The flight from Orlando to Ohio was the hardest as it was a with a cheaper airline that didn't allow cabin bag without paying lots of money, so we booked an extra under carriage bag. This meant that our cabin bags needed to collapse down to fit inside our normal luggage for that flight only, and still stay under the weight limit. It was a pretty stressful time, but luckily Kristine is a packing god and managed to get us through by skimming the bag weight limits by a couple of grams per bag.
My next couple of blog posts will describe our travel on the way back to Australia, but I wanted to take this time to say that we really loved our time in Malmö and Sweden in general. We found the people were lovely and welcoming (once you got past the Swedish dislike of small talk...) and the travel was amazing. We never expected to places like Iceland, Rovaniemi, Budapest, Rome, Tallinn, Lichtenstein Castle, Saltzberg, Vienna, Prague, Oslo, Legoland, Niagara Falls, Disney World - just to name a few. It was an amazing opportunity and despite some initial difficulties it was a rewarding experience. The kids made friends with people with a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures, they saw so much of the world and experienced so many new things. I got to see a giant Lego pirate ship - do I need to say more..
But what made our trip so awesome was the amazing people that we met. I won't name them all here, for fearing of missing someone, but we were welcomed into so many families it was a true privilege and it really made our stay memorable, and the leaving so much harder. I am hoping that we can head back for a visit or host some of our friends in Australia soon. So, to everyone we met in Sweden, thank you all so much.
Anyway, it's time to pack the bags and get moving. We have friends and family waiting in Australia and more traveling to do. So long, Sweden. This is definitely not a goodbye.
Vi ses Sverige.
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