Stockholm Sweden Day 12

Day 12, Saturday, September 12

We have had many included breakfasts at hotels around the world, usually hockey puck rolls, cereal, and juice, tea, or coffee. The Royal Viking had the BEST breakfast we have ever had. With more choices than a big balled black bull in a herd of horny Hereford heifers they even had a Japanese buffet besides the 100 foot regular buffet. We treated this as breakfast, mid morning snack, brunch, lunch, and late afternoon snack piling on meat, potatoes, pancakes, eggs, fruit, yogurt, cheese, Danish, rolls, vegetables, and juice into a 3.86 pound pile of Swedish delight. Each morning our breakfast lasted through until our meager evening repast, and we never tired of the many options available. Like our Oslo Card we purchased a Stockholm Card that included all public transportation and admission to museums and other attractions. For the top attraction on our list, the Vasa Museum, we took bus 47 arriving 20 minutes too soon. We walked around and saw the harbor area where the Royal Warship Vasa had been launched over 300 years earlier, healed over on her maiden voyage, sunk with significant loss of life, and remained until the 1950's when an amateur sleuth found her by dropping a weighted probe all over the harbor until it came up with oak stuck in it. In the 1960's the government raised it, painstakingly preserved it, and finally moved it to the present location, where millions of people on the day we chose to visit, have seen this magnificent ship builder's folly. So, do you suppose the master ship builder disappeared immediately after the top of the mast slipped under the waves? If he didn't they probably keel hauled him under another ship of better design. Along with the Viking Ships, this certainly topped the charts as a must see in Scandinavia. We got on another bus 47 and got off one stop too soon at a Skansen side entrance. Similar to the open air museum in Oslo, Skansen held many buildings from all over Sweden. That day they had a pony show near the included zoo which had the Binky well. Toddlers brought their pacifiers to dispose of, some more willing than others, at a Binky wishing well. When they get home, I'll bet some wish they had their Binky back. The zoo had a wide variety of animals including reindeer, moose, and pot bellied pigs, the real ones, not pregnant ugly women. After talking to a lady dressed as an early Swedish farm wife, we walked 6.78 miles through every exhibit, building, and gift shop in the park. Bus 69 took us to Kaknastornet/Kaknas Tower. Our Stockholm Card got us to the top for a 360 degree view of Stockholm, harbor, and countryside. A group of museums had Culture, Technology, Sport, and Maritime very close to each other with the end result of completely worn out minds and legs. We motored around Stockholm on the bus, back to the hotel, to Gamla Stan/Old Town where we ordered Swedish meat balls, and fish at a hole in the wall take out place. We rode another bus to the closed toy museum and back to the metro, the hotel, and bed.

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