Sweden

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Monday, June 18

We took the morning express train to Stockholm and arrived mid-afternoon. We went to the hostel that we booked on-line a few nights earlier called the Red Boat Malaren. The hostel is literally a red boat docked in the Baltic Sea located 30 minutes by foot from the city center train station. John and I trekked there with our backpacks across three bridges. After dropping off our backpacks, we walked around the old city called Gamla Stan. There is a charming pedestrian street in Gamla Stan called Vasterlanggatan where we ate at an Italian restaurant for dinner.

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Tuesday, June 19

We woke up early to take a bicycle tour of Stockholm. It was a perfect sunny day for a bike ride. The tour guide was from Ireland and had moved to Sweden to be with his Swedish girlfriend whom he had met in Ireland when she was working as an au pair. He had just started the bicycle touring company and gave two tours a day. It was a great tour and we saw a lot of Stockholm. During the tour, we stopped at an outdoor café where John and I shared a delicious meal of side pork, potato pancakes, lingon berries, and Swedish beer. It was awesome!

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Stockholm is made up of 14 islands connected by 57 bridges. It also connected by countless miles of pedestrian and bike paths that go all the way west to Norway and north to the Arctic Circle. One third of Stockholm is woods, one-third is forest, and the other third is land inhabited by a little less then two million people. It is a very livable, charming city and I could see living here except for the cold weather.

After the bicycle tour, we took a boat tour through the islands that make up Stockholm and the Baltic Sea. Early evening, we made our way to the dock to take the ship to Turku, Finland. At check-in and after we boarded the ship, we checked to see if any cabins had become available because the boat did not dock at Turku until 7:30 in the morning. We were put in a waiting list behind forty other people. I checked back in a half-hour and still no luck. About five minutes later as I was getting a cappuccino and a piece of cake to console myself, my name was called over the loudspeaker to go to the information desk. We got a cabin! Now we can enjoy the ship. It has ten decks of cabins, gambling, live musical entertainment, shops, and many restaurants. It completely exceeds my expectations. John and I are sipping Blueberry Vodka and Sprite drinks while listening to Swedish and Finnish renditions of Black Magic Woman and other American songs and watching a sixty year old woman dances by herself on the dance floor with many on-lookers. It doesn’t get any better than this.