Not all of today’s surprises were unwelcome.  For instance, when Lanie disappeared down to the hip lobby of our hip hostel this morning while the rest of us were packing up, who could expect that she’d return with Ms. Louise!  What!?  Louise in Stockholm!?  That was not expected.  She was in town visiting friends and conspired with Lanie over the past day or so to pop in and say hi.  We enjoyed a nice walk with her to the train station, where we would be storing most of our things in a locker while we toured another part of Stockholm this morning.

Another pleasant surprise:  The old section of the city is very pretty and quite extensive, with narrow cobbled streets branching out to even more narrow cobbled alleyways.

We wandered here for some time, barely managing to avoid purchasing any number of souvenirs.  We still have a fair bit of Scandinavia to lug things through.

The changing of the guard in front of the royal palace was an elaborate event witnessed by several hundred fellow onlookers.  We were surprised the crowds gathered so quickly and wished we hadn’t lingered inside the palace for so long (you can just walk around in there for free — and there are more parts you can pay to visit, like the royal apartments, which seems a little invasive on King Carl Gustav, but he apparently obliges).  The Royal Guards marching band was pretty tight, and what a surprise it was when

they played a medley that included “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” and “It’s Raining Men.”  These musical clues may give an idea of the weather for the morning.  It was actually a not uncomfortable amount of showers.

That pretty much gets us through the pleasant surprises for the day.  We left the old town for the train station, had a quick lunch in a taco bar, recovered our stored luggage, and made it to our train on time.

We have been very good at getting ourselves where we’re supposed to be in plenty

of time.  The Swedish railway system was not as reliable.  We watched in horror as a 50-minute delay blamed on “electrical issues” burned through our 30-minute layover in Gothenburg and made us 20 minutes late for our train to Oslo.

The horror mounted as officials from Swedish rail explained that they would not compensate for their mistake because we had booked our journey through the Eurail system and not the Swedish rail system.

The horror basically peaked when it dawned on us that lacking any further trains, bus seats, or available rental cars that could take us to Oslo, we would miss out on the night’s book accommodations in Oslo and basically the whole Norwegian leg of our trip.  The next few days of travel relied on us getting on a train in Oslo the next morning at 8 a.m.   This all dawned on us in a shower of unpleasant surprises.

The Pavlik family sprung into action to go through every option we could collectively think of.  We begged the rail company for help, both on the train and via a phone call from the station.  We tried to book the last bus of the day (sold out).  We tried to rent a car (all agencies closed, even those that claimed to be open).  Nadia scoped out a local bus path that would have taken seven legs overnight and gotten us to Oslo at 7 a.m., and also searched around for potential accommodations in Gothenburg (which is likely a very nice place, but its name will make our family shudder for years to come), but they were extremely pricey and hard to find.  Zoe tried to get the European SIM card that we’d bought working, so we could make calls and use data.

Lanie suggested booking an Uber for the four-hour drive from Gothenburg to Oslo.  We originally dismissed that idea out of hand — and then we were surprised to find that this was our best, and possibly only, option to keep us on our scheduled plan.

It may seem like an Ugly American option to just throw a bunch of money at a problem — and hiring an Uber for five people to connect two cities that are four hours apart does involve a big bunch of money — but please judge us carefully.  We had several days of hotel reservations riding on this decision, and losing them would have cost us a bunch of money, too.

So, Zoe helped us stick out our Uber thumb and try to hitch a ride into Norway.  The first two drivers who accepted our call, quickly dropped, apparently once they realized the magnitude of the trip.

The third driver accepted our challenge, but 20 minutes into the drive he said we had a problem and handed his phone back to Jen so she could talk to his boss.  It turns out this driver was running up against Sweden’s laws for how long a person could drive in one shift.  Unbelievably, we had to turn around and try again at the Gothenburg train station.

At this point we had gone through out allotted amount of unpleasant surprises, which is to say that nothing unpleasant really surprised us anymore.  Zoe caught us another Uber within five minutes, and this driver was up for the journey.  For what it’s worth, driving from Gothenburg to Oslo is a lot like driving through the Berkshires

or Catskills — given the distance, maybe you can say it’s like driving through the Bershires and the Castskills.  It was not unpleasant.  Though, every time the driver’s phone rang we silently willed him not to answer so he wouldn’t get called off the job.

He was a very efficient driver and got us to Oslo in very good time.  But our day wasn’t quite over yet.  As we staggered into our hotel at midnight and attempted to check in, we ran into another problem — we had somehow booked the hotel for the prior day, and had been marked as a no-show.  So we had to book new rooms (thankfully they had a quad and a single available) at more expense.  We had further problems attempting to use the pull-out couch in our room, and eventually the hotel had to bring us a cot (which they had earlier said was “not possible”).  It was after 1am before we finally collasped into bed, hoping this all would turn out to be worth it.