Stockholm

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As mentioned previously there was only one train to Stockholm from Oslo on the Sunday which wasn't due to arrive into Stockholm until 10:05pm. It involved a 6 hour train trip which was our longest so far. We were concerned that the late arrival might be a problem for our host so we rang them to give them a heads up.

After boarding the train we heard an announcement that there had been a major incident at some location along the track and that we would need to transfer into buses to get through this section. Whilst all the announcements were made in Swedish, not all were translated into English so we were not sure we had all the information. When the conductor came around we asked what was going on and how much later this would make our arrival. He said it was likely to be an hour later which we thought may be a big problem for our hosts. A bit later into our journey we heard that there was a further problem, that not enough buses were available to take all the train passengers and that we would have to be transferred in two separate waves. This was likely to make us around 2 hours late. Of course this would be a big problem for our plans as we would not arrive at our accommodation until well after midnight as we would still have to transfer to a suburban train for a 20 minute trip and who new what the train frequency would be like after midnight.

Just when it seemed we were in big trouble another announcement came through just before we were about to get to the problem section of track that the track had been cleared and we no longer had to transfer into buses! This meant that we got to arrive into Stockholm on time after all. Our host even picked us up from the local Metro station.

Stockholm is located on a series of islands connected by bridges. We found it quite hard to orientate ourselves there as the streets are not located in a convenient grid like Melbourne. We explored the old town area (Gamla Stan) where we did a tour of their parliament house (they only have one chamber of parliament with no Senate) and the Kungliga castle. Sweden has a King but he is purely for ceremonial purposes only, he has no power unlike the queen of England who still has some. In the castle their were lots of pictures of the Crown Princess Victoria who is only 2 month younger than Ross. Some of the pictures showed her on a recent trip to Australia including at the Healesville Sanctuary. We don't remember this getting much media exposure back in Oz (but then again she did not come from Tasmania like "our" Mary).

One surprise we had whilst staying in Stockholm was that twice when we turned on the TV we caught replays of the Adelaide versus Port Adelaide football game on Eurosport 2.

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