Day 185: End of Season 3: Europe — Stockholm to Ulaanbaatar via Moscow

We’ve joked that if our year of travel was a TV series, South America would be Season 1, Africa and the Middle East was Season 2 and Europe was Season 3. It was a hell of a good time, with friends and family meeting us at several stops. But Season 3 is over and we’re headed to Asia for Season 4.

We left the Hilton in Stockholm at 10am, heading for the airport and staring down a nasty travel day.

We took a 1.5 hour Aeroflot flight from Stockholm to Moscow. A 2.5 layover in Stockholm became 4.5 hours for some reason.

We had terrible quesadillas at TGI Fridays in the Moscow airport then waited in a downstairs, enclosed and packed section of the airport with 4 gates and several scheduled flights, many of which seemed to be delayed.

We stood or sat on the floor. The kids watched iPads so they were tranquillized. The airport announcements were a loud, constant refrain — really started appreciating the handful of no-announcement airports we’ve been in this year.

We finally boarded….

A bus. Which took us 5 – 7 minutes to the plane where we watched every person from the previous bus get on while we were packed in with doors locked for another several minutes

We finally boarded the plane and found we had two seats in two different rows, both sets boxed in the middle of the four-seat middle section. Two suuuuper nice women sitting on the aisles of Margaret’s row offered their two seats to us. Wow. So we ended up having four seats across in the middle section.

It was a 5.5 hour flight was leaving at 7pm Stockholm time. They also started a meal service 90 minutes into the flight. Not ideal sleeping conditions.

James snoozed for a couple hours. Willa got maybe 90 minutes. I got an hour or so. Margaret got none. Willa was all over her, tossing and turning.

I was entertained by the Netflix doc series on Formula 1 — Drive to Survive. Really good.

We landed around 7am in Ulaanbaatar….