Oh, yeah: report on upgrade

Gretchen reminded me that I had failed to report back as to what an "upgrade" means at the Bear Lake Lodge. The story just got crazier and crazier. Stace didn't make the trip to Bear Lake with us that day because she had a headache, so it was just the kids and me (and Jed and Zoe, but they already knew where they were sleeping).

My upgrade consisted of a two-bedroom apartment complete with living room and kitchenette. I couldn't believe it. So the end result was that the kids slept at the cabin with everyone else and I slept all alone in my two-bedroom apartment at the Bear Lake Lodge. I had a hard time choosing which bedroom to use all by myself. I finally chose the bigger one, not that it really mattered. I had plenty of room. What an odd experience.

Norway, day 4 (Tromsø)

When I first got to Tromsø, I panicked. I had just come from Oslo, a vibrant, modern, bustling city. As I walked the block to my hotel in Tromsø, I felt like I'd been dropped in a small town that could have been called Hickville. I was worried because I didn't have enough books with me to read for the entire 48 hours I'd be in town, and I knew I wouldn't be leaving my hotel room because there wasn't anything worth seeing.

Well, first impressions can be deceiving, and it didn't take me long to settle into life in Tromsø. It wasn't a bad town; it just had the characteristics that almost all small towns have, like plenty of gravel roads, older storefronts, and that sort of thing, and I needed to work through some cultural whiplash. I was fine after that.

Lest you think that Ethan Wood, World Traveler, always stays in luxury hotels, here's a picture of my hotel room in Tromsø:

I'm standing by the bathroom door to take the picture, but that's pretty much my whole room.

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I did manage to eat lots of seafood, see lots of cool things, and take in some more goregous scenery. The first night I was there, I went to a midnight concert at the catheral. Here are some pictures of the catheral from different angles:

The next day, I went to a couple of museums. It was most gratifying to see a display confirming what I'd been telling Stace for 20 years now about making the bed:

And here are some other sights:

All things end . . . .

Well, we've officially decided to move back to Minnesota next summer. I'll miss the mild winters, the chocolate, the cheese, the Alps, the opportunity to travel Europe, the quirkiness of the Swiss, the fantastic public transportation, the lack of tornadoes, the colorful money, and a health care system that actually works efficiently for everyone.

My life is now focused on two things: finding a job back in Minnesota and seeing as much of the rest of Europe as I can. Very tentative plans for us include an eastern Mediterranean cruise (which will include Italy, Croatia, Greece, and Turkey), London, Egypt, and Disneyland Paris again (I could skip the last one, but we promised the kids we'd go one more time before leaving Switzerland). But alas, there's so much more we won't be able to see!

What does this mean to you, my faithful readers? It means that both of you need to get your cabooses over here for a visit, pronto. After all, how often do you have a free place to stay in Switzerland? The clock is ticking. Switzerland won't be here forever, you know.

Norway, day 3

Day 3 was "Norway in a Nutshell." I left Oslo at 6:30 a.m., rode a train for five hours, cruised up a couple of fjords and rode a bus down the steepest road in Norway, rode back on a train for five hours, and got back to Oslo at 10:30 p.m. It was quite a day. I have about a hundred pictures of gorgeous scenery, but I'll just include a representative sample.



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A six-year-old veteran

Just a quick thought here that I forgot to mention earlier: I realized that my kids have become official veterans of international air travel. At one point when we were taking off from Atlanta and Lindsey was waiting to be able to play her handheld Nintento DS, she turned to me and asked, "Are we above ten thousand feet yet?" Those words sounded a little odd coming from the mouth of a girl who still says "wif" for "with."

Here we are

Whew! We're back. Our flight out of Atlanta was delayed by three hours, but Stace and Tanner got upgraded to business class, so things turned out fine. Tanner was in heaven. Lindsey and I had fun hanging out in the cattle pen we call "economy" (also known by its other name, "hell").

One little story that made me laugh at the differences between the Swiss and the Americans: After we got home yesterday, I went to the post office to pick up our mail, which had been on hold. In the U.S., they'll hold your mail for free, and they gather it up and hand it to you in a big pile whenever you get around to dropping by the post office to pick it up. (In Switzerland, of course, they charge you a fee to hold your mail.)

I had told them that I'd pick up the mail on the 20th, but since I had time, I figured I'd just swing by a day early and get it. Bad idea. I went up to the window with my forms, and the woman went to look for my mail. She came back a minute later and told me that I was a day early and that I'd have to come back the next day, the scheduled day, to pick up my mail. My first reaction was a flash of annoyance because I thought she was just being ultra-Swiss, but as I thought about it, I wondered if there was more to the story.

Sure enough, there was. I went to the window today to pick up my held mail, and it was all ready for me. It had been tied in a neat little bundle with two strings, horizontally and vertically. Each piece of mail had been stamped with a notation about the day I was coming back from vacation and the day I would be there to pick up my mail. So, to the credit of the Swiss, it wasn't that they were trying to arbitrarily enforce a rule (although they're certainly capable of that); it was just that they had a very orderly system for handling the mail and I needed to work within the system.

Life in a small town

Just a quick story about a funny small-town experience I had moments ago.

Several months ago, I called the Bear Lake Lodge in Garden City, Utah to make a reservation for Stace and me when we all go to Bear Lake. (We'll just let the kids sleep on the floor of the cabin. I'm too old and crotchety to sleep on the floor.) You have to realize that Garden City does not provide a potpourri of hotel choices. It's pretty much either the Bear Lake Lodge or your boat if you don't have a cabin to sleep in.

I've been meaning to call the Lodge to make sure that they still had me in their sophisticated reservation system, which, as far as I can tell, consists of a notebook hiding on a shelf somewhere. I didn't get around to calling them until today. My worst fears were validated when the woman on the phone (who couldn't have sounded more like a Utahn) said that she couldn't find me in the book. After a further search, though, she said she'd found my name but that someone else had "made a reservation over it." My reaction, predictably, was, "Huh?" She said that yes, my name had been written in the book but that someone had erased my name and put someone else's name in there.

Now, I'll swear on whatever stack of Bibles you want that I never called to cancel the reservation, so I'm not sure why another reservation got "made over" mine. The woman said that it probably came from having too many teenagers working there. A comforting thought, no? Anyway, she said that she'd check with her manager and see what they could do to straighten things out. I decided not to go ballistic at that point and to just let the process play itself out for a while.

Thankfully, she called me just a few minutes later to tell me that not only would we have a room, but that it would be an upgrade for the same price. At the Bear Lake Lodge, I think that "upgrade" might mean three separate beds instead of two separate beds, but I'll take it. I'll be sure to report back on what exactly an "upgrade" is at the Bear Lake Lodge.