I slept late on my second to last day in Sweden, and after I packed my things, we headed back to Lögla for one last gasp in the country. After the trip, and stopping at the grocery store, it was of course time for a fika. Anna had made kardemumabullar, like cinnamon rolls but with the flavor of cardamom instead of cinnamon, and sockerkakor, which we know as pound cake. They were both amazing, and it was wonderful to be back in the tranquility of the Swedish countryside.

After one more dip in the Baltic, it was before long time for dinner: beef, halloumi again, potatoes, salad and green beans.

After watching a rerun of the previous night’s Allsång to see if we had gotten ourselves on television — unfortunately, we had not — and looking at amazing photos from my family’s spring trip to Iceland, it was time to head to bed for my last night in Sweden.

I rose early on my last day in Sweden, determined to squeeze every last drop out of my remaining time, and we went for a long walk around the shore, ending with a swim.

Even my last meal in Sweden was remarkable. It’s very traditional in Sweden to use a cheese slicer, the sort that scrapes off a thin slice, all the time. In fact, it was originally a Nordic invention. I had a fried egg and some sliced Swedish cheese on toast. Delicious.

I packed up my things and we left for Stockholm’s Arlanda airport with plenty of time to spare. But when we walked into the airport, prepared for an emotional goodbye, I was hit with an entirely different emotion. The departures board grimly informed me that my KLM flight to Amsterdam had been cancelled, and it was immediately clear that there was no other flight to Amsterdam that would get me there in time for my connecting flight to the U.S.

Naturally, the ticketing office was using the kölapp system, the much more efficient alternative to lines that is only used at supermarket delis in the U.S. but is nearly universal in Sweden. (You take a little piece of paper with a number and wait for it to appear on a screen.) The numbers were being called at a glacial pace, so I bid farewell to my family, assuring them that the airline would have to do something for me.

Luckily, thanks to earning “elite” status after our trip to Asia and a trip earlier this year, I was able to take a priority kölapp slip and got rebooked after only about an hour onto Air France flights through Paris. The KLM agent even gave me a coupon for 100 Swedish crowns worth of food in the airport. And so, before too long, I was rushing for my flight, which turned out to be wearing a nice retro paint scheme.

Before my trip, I was very curious to see my reaction to my second time in Sweden. Over the last two years, I’ve really built up Sweden in my head: wonderful people, wonderful scenery, wonderful culture, and so forth. And I wondered how much of that had a basis in reality, and how much was just me romanticizing my time abroad. I’m happy to report that Sweden, on second visit, was just as wonderful as I remembered. And I was especially surprised and pleased to realize how much progress I’ve made with the language. Even though I still have tons more work to do, I feel much more like learning Swedish is an achievable goal.

The moral of the story, of course, is that I really need to figure out a way to get back there for another extended period. Ten days just wasn’t nearly enough.