We spent a couple of days catching up with Pete and some of our other Swedish friends, as well as finalising our bag packing. We were significantly over the baggage limit for our flights, so we ended up posting our two camping backpacks back to Australia, in addition to the one we had sent before Christmas.
Around lunch time on the 12th, we bid farewell to Pete and dragged our 140kg of suitcases and 30kg of backpacks onto the train to Copenhagen.
Of course, when we arrived at the airport station, the escalator was broken and we had to drag all of the bags up quite a steep slope. I had a backpack on front and back and two suitcases, I later calculated that I was lugging 70kg.
Once we got to the top, we loaded our bags into two airport trollies and used them to wheel our bags over to our hotel, which was just across the road. We had planned to then go into Copenhagen for the day, but instead we crashed out, finalised bags and had a visit from Tom's friend.
The next morning we were up for breakfast and then at the airport early to check in for our 8am flight. We were worried our bags would be over the weight limit, but the undercarriage ones went through without a problem.
We checked out the Lego stores in the airport to collect the special stamps they did and then waited around until our flight to Doha.
The 7 hour flight was pretty uneventful and we landed in Doha, where we did some shopping and waited for our next flight.
The next flight was the long one - 13 hours from Doha to Adelaide. In order to make this flight comfortable, we had paid extra for extended legroom seats, but it was only when we took our seats that we realised these were listed as 'basinet seats' that allowed a baby basinet to be attached to the bulkhead. The family seated behind us had two babies and asked whether we had booked the seats to use the basinet. We had paid around $1,000 to secure the seats so we didn't want to swap but we did end up allowing the family to set up the basinets in front of us. We still had the legroom, but ended up with not being able to watch our screens and every time there was turbulence or the babies stirred, the parents had to pick them up, meaning we didn't really get a chance to try to sleep. Add to that the fact of feeling guilty for not moving, it was not a fun flight.
We arrived in Adelaide at 5pm and by 6:30 we had our bags and hire car and checked into our hotel in Adelaide.
We took a quick walk to pick up dinner and some shopping supplies and then had an early night.
The next morning we headed down to our house with the aim to paint the boys bedrooms and the ceiling of the lounge and hallway. Alana had already purchased the paint for us and had come down to help, so we spent a full day painting before heading back to the hotel for a sleep.
The next day we received both our air freight and stored items (just sea freight and the mailed backpacks to go) and spent some time unpacking and trying to get the house in order.
One of the main issues was we knew that we had a stack of stuff coming from Sweden so didn't want to fully set up the house as we knew we would need to rearrange things again.
The concerns we had about the packing of the stored items were correct - the packers had rushed and the first few boxes were packed perfectly with each plate wrapped neatly, but as they had gotten further into the garage boxes, items were just thrown in boxes:
Luckily there were not too many broken items, but it was a bit disappointing.
Our sea freight arrived on the 18th of Feb and I was able to watch the ship carrying it (the ) pull into harbour on a tracking app:
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