Butler Family Travels

Traveling during the off-season has more benefits than drawbacks unless you are in Stockholm and it is closed for renovation. Off-season means less crowds, shorter lines, better prices, and cooler temperatures. In most places we have visited there have been a few closed sights, but we just moved on and saw it as an opportunity […]

You may have recently heard that the Swedish curling team just beat the Canadians at the World Curling Cup in Canada. Guess what? That Swedish curling team is from Ostersund. Cool, huh? It’s kinda in the middle of nowhere, but, hey, they have some fun sports. Here’s one we got to participate in. There’s frozen […]

Therese and Jeb go way back. Therese was an exchange student from Sweden when Jeb was a High School senior in Oregon.  They spent all their free time that winter skiing together at Mt. Bachelor. Therese also spent most days before and after school with Jeb and his sister. They ate a lot of cereal […]

Yah, pronounce that one!  It goes like this: free udugs myeese and means Cozy Friday.  Fredagsmys is another tradition we may need to import.  It amounts to a mix up of family night and taco Tuesday. Our friends Tobias, Therese, Filip, Jakob and Oskar taught us to observe this tradition, and here is my recommendation:  […]

We flew from Hamburg to Stockholm where we were picked up by my sister-in-law. We spent 2 days with her and I will write more about that later after we go back to spend more time with them! Let’s skip ahead to Thursday, though, when we took a train north for 7 hours to a […]

Not so much wherever we go!  It didn’t snow in Thailand or Malaysia, but we have a perfect record of being snowed upon in every other country.

Arriving in a new city with no expectations and no responsibility is a fun change.  Sarah’s sister, Amy, hosted another wonderful vacation from self guided tourism for us in Hamburg, Germany. We didn’t have to find the cool restaurants, coffee shops, flea markets or landmarks on our own. She met us at the central train […]

“Let’s just go down to see the bridge one more time.” We checked under the beds, took out the garbage, heaved on our packs, and checked out of the apartment. After catching the metro to the other side of the river we also decided we couldn’t resist one more visit to the bakery we had […]

A few interesting facts about Prague\Czech Republic: According to the Guinness World Records, Prague Castle is the largest ancient castle in the world. Prague was the seat of The Holy Roman Empire during the 14th century. The Jews of Prague have a very long history here. There are in fact 7 Synagogues in Prague. Mozart conducted […]

The history of the city of Prague begins with a fairy tale story.  Legend says that the Princess Libuse, hoping he would help her yield sturdy heirs to the throne, chose a ploughman to be her groom.  She stood on the hill overlooking the valley and foretold of a beautiful city that would one day […]