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After thirty-six hours of cruising on the Baltic Sea from Copenhagen, we docked in Stockholm this morning shortly before 9 AM. It has been surprisingly smooth sailing thus far, with sea conditions calm. When we docked, the air temperature was 33 degrees, but it rose to a balmy 60 degrees by mid-day, with clear blue skies and sunshine the order of the day.
We had booked an excursion, "Stockholm On Your Own", which provided bus transportation to three separate locations in the city, where participants were free to visit what they wished independently. It seemed like a flexible approach, but as it turned out, there were simply too many sights and too little time devoted to each location. As a result, we came away from today's experience both frustrated and a little disappointed.
The first stop on our tour this morning was the Vasa Museum at Djurgården, an island in central Stockholm, that is home to historical buildings and monuments, museums, galleries, the amusement park Gröna Lund, the open-air museum Skansen, the small residential area of Djurgårdsstaden, yacht harbors, and extensive stretches of forest and meadows. It is one of Stockholm's favorite recreation areas and tourist destinations, attracting over
10 million visitors per year, of which some 5 million come to visit the museums and amusement park.
The Vasa Museum displays the only almost fully intact 17th-century ship that has ever been salvaged, the 64-gun warship Vasa that sank on her maiden voyage in 1628. The museum opened in 1990 and, according to the official web site, is the most visited museum in Scandinavia. Overloaded with cannons and unstable, the ship sank after sailing about 1,400 yd. into its maiden voyage. It was located again in the late 1950s just outside the Stockholm harbor, then recovered with a largely intact hull in 1961.
One of the more amusing incidents of the trip so far occurred when we stopped at a snack bar outside the museum for coffees and a cinnamon roll. A resident duck, who was obviously well-trained in the art of begging from tourists, started following Dee around, hoping for a morsel of the tasty treat in her hand. The duck was so persistent that it began to unnerve Dee as we sat down on a bench to drink our coffees. Just as she was beginning to warm-up to the little guy, and while zooming in
her cell phone to snap a photo, I heard her yell out: "Oh, no...he just took a big s**t!" That ended the brief romance, right there and then. But it was hilarious...wish I had captured it on video!
The next stop on our whirlwind tour was the Old City
(Gamla Stan), the city's historic island core. As the capital of Sweden, Stockholm is the most populous urban area in the Nordic countries, with about 965,000 people living in the municipality proper (2.4 million in the metropolitan area). The city stretches across fourteen islands where Lake Mälaren flows into the Baltic Sea. Outside the city to the east, and along the coast, is the island chain of the Stockholm archipelago.
While the Old City area is dominated by such monumental buildings as the Royal Palace, and the nearby Swedish Parliament, its narrow streets, alleys, shops, churches, etc., create a certain photogenic atmosphere. Ideally, it would have taken us the better part of an entire day to wander around this area, but we had less than two hours to do so. So I struck out on my own for about an hour, while Dee sat on a bench in a
garden area behind the Parliament building. But the walking distances were such that I barely had time for a quick pass around the Royal Palace, and then a short stretch of the main pedestrian street, the Västerlånggatan
(The Western Long Street). The last stop was basically a 40-minute photo opportunity at the City Hall, with its impressive mix of millions of red bricks and chips of gilt mosaic, with a 348 ft. tower. As one of Europe's finest public buildings, it's the site of the annual Nobel Prize banquet. Although we had no time to go inside this impressive place, we did enjoy some nice views overlooking the waterfront before the bus returned us to the ship at around 4:00 PM.
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Jeni
non-member comment
Sorry your excursion wasn’t all it was quacked up to be! You did get some beautiful photos of Stockholm. Love the story of Dee and the duck. The sunset from the ship is spectacular!