Those Crazy Swedes

Mom and dad are in Sweden right now buying a car. Kind of an odd thing to be doing there, if you ask me. But when Volvo says "if you come to our factory and pick up your new car, we'll take $5000 off the price tag, pay your round-trip airfare, pay the shipping and import tariffs, and roll it down a red carpet to you during the prsentation ceremony", it's hard to say no.

If you are like me, you wonder what the horrible catch must be. Here it is - they can only (for wahtever reason) import a used car. So what that means is that mom and dad "have" to drive it around Europe for two weeks to put some mileage on the thing before it can be shipped back here.

lucky buggers...

So they flew out of Seattle on Sunday and found themselves in Gothenburg, Sweden after a stop at Copenhagen. Although their luggage managed to miss the flight (a twist all good vacation stories must include), it sounds like they got the car thing all taken care of. They are driving from Gothenburg over through Sweden to Norway, heading north along the coast, back into Sweden to Stockholm, then driving across the bridge over to Denmark to do some cruising around Germany till they get to Bonn or Bremerhaven or wherever it is they're dropping the car off. They've got just about two weeks of stops planned, it sounds fabulous. I wish I could go with them, or at least do that trip myself sometime (since road trips with my folks are a little weird).

And on top of it all, during the two weeks they're gone, they will miss my birthday, Father's Day, and my sister's birthday. They better be gettin us some kick-ass presents over there...

They deserve it though, it's their 30th Wedding Anniversary this year and they haven't ever really taken a vacation just the two of them as far as I can recall. I'm sure they're having fun!