Hi!
Since the beginning of 2021 I've had the great pleasure and honour to cooperate with an amazing craft supply manufacturer, Carabelle Studio. I've been a huge fan of their stamps for years; their large selection of stamps and stencils designed by my favourite designers (Birgit Koopsen, Kate Crane, Ana Bondu, Azoline, Jen Bishop to name a few) have taken me to their webshop several times during the past years 😀.
Good quality photo polymer stamps are nice, but personally I prefer working with rubber stamps. With Carabelle I love the fact that their rubber stamps come mounted; I hate working with the sticky mounting foams and getting the stamps mounted and ready to go saves me a lot of time and trouble.
Carabelle Studio designers and DT members projects are shared on Carabelle Facebook page *here*. Our fan page is in Facebook, too (*here*); we're all looking forward to seeing your creations! The fan/community page is called Les Cara Friends 💓
Sorry for the long introduction; can't help that I'm so excited for being part of the design team! 😀
This scrapbook page is not just about highlighting the lovely Carabelle stamps (even though the cactus stamps are quite yummy!). It is about documenting a very strange weekend I spend in Stockholm with my family early March 2020. Who would have known that after a few weeks we would enter the new Covid pandemic era and countries would start to close not just their borders but also their restaurants, bars, hotels, shops etc. Very little did we know then; our Sweden trip had other types of obsticles...
The purpose of this trip was to cheer and support our son in his international badminton tournament in Kista, Stockholm. We booked flights and a big hotel room for the entire family and were really looking forward to a nice weekend together.
Then the tournament got cancelled, just before the weekend.
Our tickets were non-refundable, and even if Kista probably wouldn't have been my first choice for a family weekend in Sweden, we thought that it would still do. It's only a short metro ride from down town so all Stockholm attractions would be easily reachable anyway.
I've travelled quite a bit and my family is somewhat experienced in that area, too. Yet I want to simplify things to the extent possible: I knew that in the Helsinki airport we would have to walk a bit to the gate and for making the transfer easy I checked in our small cabin-sized luggages.
We had not heard nor read that the ground staff was taking some strike actions, nor did the check-in clerk say anything. We were at the airport well on time early Friday afternoon, so I was quite surprised to realize in Kista that our luggage did not make it. Most of the peoples' luggage was onboard; only a handful of passangers did not get the bags. We included.
Reporting the issue took a while, but eventually we got into the taxi and drove to our hotel. Luckily the hotel (really nice one!) was close to a shopping center so we could buy some necessities for the night and the morning. We were sure the luggage would arrive in the morning as there are many of flights between Helsinki and Stockholm late evening and even early Saturday morning.
To cut the long story short: The luggage did not arrive. After returning back home we learned that the bags were delivered to Stockholm right after we returned home on Sunday. One week later they had travelled back to Helsinki and we finally got them back.
On Saturday morning in Kista we had a lovely breakfast at the hotel and decided to make the best of our stay anyway: We visited all the sights we had planned and as my husband was celebrating his birthday we had a lovely birthday dinner in the city Saturday evening. I did not care that we were wearing old jeans and sweat pants; it just was what it was 😀
As a frequent traveller I filed a claim after our return home and I got a nice refund from Finnair. The unfortunate thing is that the flight voucher is still unused as Covid has stopped all our travelling. Well, there's still a few months left to use it; maybe we'll get a chance to make a revisit to Stockholm later this year.
As mentioned, the hotel was really nice and trendy with a really friendly staff. The cactus picture is taken from the hotel lobby.
Quite an adventure, thanks for reading the story!
Hugs,
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