Departure!

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Well, we're off!

We arrived at our gate in Madison and were greeted with the eerie silence of a flight that's been secretly moved to the next gate down. Once we resolved that issue, things improved considerably. Miraculously, all of our planes took off on time, despite the fact that we were
1. flying United,
2. through O'Hare.

The second leg was a codeshare flight, operated by SAS, which is the loveliest airline either of us has flown. The seats were comfortable and the meals were as tasty as airplane food can be, with key lime bars for dessert. (Graham: "And free cocktails!") The in-seat entertainment also had an interesting feature: a view from the underside of the plane, pointed toward the ground. Not very useful when flying over Greenland at night, but it added some excitement to our early morning descent into Stockholm.

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