I had many stories and photos to show dating back to 2018, possibly earlier but that may go too far. I’d like to start from one of our big journeys in 2018. We planned to visit as many relations as possible in the UK and Scandinavia, these countries were our origins, Pat was actually born in New Zealand but with English and welsh parents they moved back to the UK so all the relatives were all there, and myself I was born in Sweden before moving to Australia. The idea was to see as much as possible as well as see friends and relatives. With Pats short term memory a lot of planning was done to make this as comfortable as possible with the help of our daughter Jae ( our booking agent). Planning is essential, everything from packing to ensuring all medications were with us for this 10 week trip, I had written up our itinerary so I didn’t have to think about time frames, just check the paperwork in my travel folder, this eliminates stress whilst looking after Pat and her needs so there’s plenty to occupy yourself. This story started on the 3rd. Of July with a late flight to Europe.
Our first stop was Heathrow uk before we headed off to Sweden for a month or so, Pats sister Jean and her husband Brian together with Pats brother Richard and wife Jeanette met us at the airport. Yes after Long flight nothing like a lot of people meeting you when what we needed was sleep…
We arrived in Sweden on the 5th. July our anniversary,and after a few days relaxing at my nieces farm house and catching up with family which we hadn’t seen for many years we were off to Norway on the train. This is where it as important to be organised, there were time tables , buses , unfamiliar train stations and lots of questions from Pat whilst trying to converse with officials in Swedish. But since I had diarised our trip together with all relevant documents made it less confusing to explain to Pat, “calm was the order of the day”. All this combined stopped my brain from being scrambled eggs.
The train trip to OSLO Norway went without a hitch until we were an hour from the destination due to some maintenance work on the line so changed to a bus for the last hour, this meant luggage on and off a couple of times to board the train to Gjovik which is a couple of hours north of Oslo. We spent a couple of days there visiting a host family for our daughter a few yers ago. We had a great time with them as they showed us around the area including the winter Olympic site which is still being used for training and competitions.
TPSchwalbe Travel Life 