Sweden vol 2: Exclusion in Transit

Each year, the International Junior Branch chooses an educational theme for JBs around the world to integrate into their programming and to help guide the International Junior Branch Conference. This year the theme is EXCLUSION. To launch this theme, the IJB put out an Exculsion packet which outlines the goals of the theme and also a series of activities that can be used to help integrate this theme. If you want to check out this action-packed-packed you can download it from the IJB website! (The username is: ijb.public, password: ijb)

Kelly and Alex are now in Sweden and you might say that our journey here was an exercise in inclusion. If you had looked at our orignal travel itinerary you might have called it "exclusive". It had us travelling like this: Toronto > Newark, USA > Stockholm, Sweden > Jonkoping, Sweden. Only two countries outside of Canada? With all the airports in the world to see, why be so exclusive? But so it was that we departed from Toronto early Saturday morning.

But our trip wasn't to be so exclusive after all!

We arrived in Newark mid-morning on Saturday and after a brief jaunt into New York City we arrived back to the air port only to discover that our flight to Stockholm had been cancelled! Oh No! (Note the sad-faced photo, graciously taken by a "Dr. Pepper" representative-- a fellow victim of the cancellation). Re-routing was in order and before we could spell "Jonkoping" we had a flight path that was considerably more in the spirit of INCLUSION!

Our new flight to Paris which has been scheduled to depart at 7:25 PM left the gate around 11:30. Some hours later the sun had re-appeared and we touched down in Paris. Was this to be the extent of the detour, you ask? No. No it wasn't. We had to race through the Paris airport to catch our flight to--can you guess?-- Oslo, Norway!

If Kelly and Alex were contestants on The Amazing Race would they win? Probably.

Well, they were on schedule to win this leg of the race with their flight from Olso to Stockholm. This was the second last flight to the final destination (only a shortie from Stockholm to Jonkoping remained!). But disaster struck when a roadblock appeared in Stockholm.

They missed their flight.

And so here we sit, friends, in a very comfortable, very Ikea, hotel inside the Stockholm airport-- the window literally looking out onto the concourse. A mild disaster? Perhaps not. With nowhere to have gone in Jonkoping and bags that wouldn't have met us there, our Ikea lounge looks like a pretty good way to spend the night (not to mention a daylong excursion day in Stockholm tomorrow).

In line with the IJB education theme, we should probably thank Scandanavian Airlines for making this leg of our trip thoroughly inclusive. When we finally land in Jonkoping tomorrow we will have seen 6 airports in 5 countries. If nothing else, this has been experiential education as it's most...experiential.

k&a

giving the goodbye gun to our missed flight to Jonkoping