Days 09-11

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Day 9: Stockholm

Today was our day trip to central Stockholm, featuring two museums – the National (art) museum, which included an interesting featured collection entitled “Lust and Vice”, and the Historical Museum (much Viking material, which helped connect some of the dots from Adelso). The Viking collection is striking, with such skill and artistry shown in all their artefacts. There were tiny pieces of jewellery and even a toothpick and nail cleaner in silver. The clothing, some original fragments and some reconstructions, was also beautiful work of highly skilled weavers. Vikings were anything but the uncivilised lot their reputation would suggest.

These major undertakings occupied much of the morning and afternoon respectively. In between we attempted to shop, (without much success, even though we went to many, many shops) and observed an eccentric collection of buskers in the city centre.


Day 10: Ekerso nature reserve and Drottningholm

Another long walk in the woods this morning, on a promontory that ends in a point with a wonderful 300-degree panorama of a section of Lake Malaren. The main feature of the walk was that we encountered no fewer than three snakes, which is as many as we’d see in a couple of years’ walking around home. All were common (we found out later) non-poisonous grass snakes, but still … they are grey and blend effectively into the landscape, so that visions of snakes all over the tracks was a bit of a worry! The countryside is beautiful, the ground covered with mossy grass which is soft and great to walk on. The weather continued glorious, in the low 20s. We have had no rain, either – also apparently very unusual for this time of year.

Drottningholm is yet another palace, this being the one that the royals actually live in most of the time. But we doubt that they spend much time in the rooms we were shown around. The palace, as all around Sweden, is florally decked out a treat, both in gardens and tubs. Everywhere – presumably this is an early-spring thing –you can see teams of workers planting and transplanting flowers and shrubs in public places. Roadsides, roundabouts, gardens – all get the treatment. Speciality colours seem to be blue and yellow – very nationalistic. The paintings at the palace were huge, mainly of royalty and aristocracy. There was one king Gustav who seemed to spend half his life sitting for portraits – there were heaps of him, but he didn’t seem to age all that much!

Battle scenes were one of the main topics of the huge whole wall paintings – presumably they were all won by Sweden. The paintings almost looked like maps with landscape and troop movements included. There were not many tourists around – the benefit of travelling early in spring – and a cup of coffee overlooking the river in the sunshine was a great way to end the day.

Packed and cleaned up ready for the drive to Arlanda airport. We have noticed that even in the six days we have been in our cottage the trees have begun to develop their green covering of buds for the spring..


Day 11: Adelso-Stockholm-Copenhagen-Paris!!!

Up at 4.30 to hit the road. We thought we knew the way to Arlanda, given that we went past it on the way to Uppsala, and we only took the one wrong turn. Thanks to its being Good Friday, with no traffic, we dropped off the car in plenty of time and caught our flight to Paris via a 6-hour stopover in Copenhagen. As Australians we dream of visiting several countries in one day, and today we did it – brekky in Sweden, lunch in Denmark and dinner in Paris!

Copenhagen was a beautiful place – we had time to belt into the city by as usual a very fast and efficient light rail. Why Australia can’t do this?? We saw the Little Mermaid, walked around the harbour and had a lovely lunch, amongst many other tourists doing the same serenaded sporadically by a number of buskers. Also another Changing of the Guard, more impressive than Stockholm's, even had proper busbies on the soldiers, but still not up to the Brits. Then back to the airport and off to Paris.

Arriving in Paris on Good Friday was an experience. We navigated to Paris via train and were greeted by a huge crowd at St Michel-Notre Dame station that seemed to extend from there to our hotel. It seemed as if everyone from the US and UK were on holidays as well. Our hotel is close to where we stayed the last time, not far off Bde Saint Germain, and we can see the Sorbonne from our window. It is quite noisy at night but the double glazed windows are terrific.

– Helen

(More photos - scroll right to bottom)

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