The flight

On Monday, July 11th, we left home to spend nearly three weeks in Sweden. I tried to prepare myself for the flight, which is nothing short of miserable. Especially the thought of traveling with kids. A 4-year old and an 11-month old. In addition, our flight left from SFO with a connection in Chicago, my most hated airport. Since we like flying with SAS who has reasonable pricing compared to other airlines and charge less for children vs. adults, flying via Chicago was a must. They did away with the SFO-Seattle-Copenhagen route a couple of years ago which is ridiculous. The Scandinavian population in the upper Northwest of the US is pretty large. Doing away with the Seattle hub really was dumb. And inconvenient for us at that. Anyhow, we had a couple of hours at SFO, got checked in, through security, ate lunch and made our way through the terminal towards our gate. Of course, the flight was late coming in from Chicago. By nearly two hours. Shocker. Waiting around at the airport at the beginning of hours and hours of traveling isn't the most fun. We finally took off and were on our way. The boys did well and both slept some. However, at the end of the 4-hour flight, Max said; "it is too far going to Sweden. I don't want to go". Ok, great. Since our flight was so late arriving, we didn't have much time at O'Hare. The distance from the terminal in which we arrived to the International terminal couldn't have been further so we rushed and made it with just about 10 minutes to go. Stressed and sweaty. NIce way to start the 8 hour + trip to Copenhagen. We took off around 10:30 pm. It had been a long day. It helped that the SAS crew was awesome, dinner was served promptly and our boys were given something to help them sleep. While Max and Finn slept well, there were some other babies on the plane just in front of us who didn't, so Brent and I didn't get many minutes of shut-eye. Around 2:30 or 3am, I woke up and tried to find an extra blanket for Finn in case he was cold. I rummaged around by our feet but couln'd find one. Brent was awake and pointed out that Max was laying on the floor sleeping. Huh, I had no idea but whatever works. Shortly thereafter, I felt something brushing against my leg. I thought it was Max waking up. I look down and I see....a cat. Yes - a cat! I reach down and pick it up. It is a huge, striped, beautiful and (thankfully) friendly cat. I say out loud; " I found a cat". People look at me, just as surprised as I am. I call over the flight attendant and inform her of the cat I found. She just says; "Oh" and takes the cat and disappears. I never heard anything else about the cat and never saw who it belonged to. Pretty strange. We were tired when we arrived in Copenhagen but got the bags pretty quickly and my brother met us at the airport and helped us with all the suitcases on and off the train all the way to mom's house. Finally, we had arrived. It was around 4pm local time on Tuesday, the 12th.