Blogs from Sweden, Europe - page 10

This was my last day in Sweden. Last night I took a photo of the view from my hotel window. (That’s the Stockholm City Hall on the right.) I started this morning by walking to City Hall where I intended to take a tour. That didn’t work out because of the large number of other tourists. All the slots for tours for the morning were already booked. Oh well. I enjoyed sitting in the courtyard and sipping my morning coffee. I spent the afternoon at the Nordic Museum which is devoted to five centuries of Swedish lifestyles. It was more interesting than it sounds! If Skansen (yesterday) was like Greenfield Village, then this museum is similar to a small-scale Henry Ford Museum. It displays Swedish house furnishings such as clocks, beds, chairs, toys, etc. But it ... read more

Unfortunately I did not “hit the ground running” this morning. I’m still feeling poorly so I didn’t follow the itinerary I had planned. Instead I saw other sights around town and I was able to get a fair amount of sightseeing accomplished. To start, I followed Rick Steves’s walking tour of Old Stockholm which includes the Royal Palace. I snapped a photo of the palace (on the right), the cathedral (in the back), and a statue of a king of Sweden on his horse in the middle. Later there was a changing of the guard that was fairly impressive and included a marching band. The Nobel Museum is nearby and I toured that. Martin Luther King was the person featured and it was interesting to see the displays about him and his life. Later in the ... read more

The next morning it did not rain, at all! So i went to Vilnius taking back roads as suggest by Mssrs Garmin, sometimes they do manage and I had a nice ride to Vilnius and a decent hotel. Vilnius is nice, I prefer it to Riga and Tallin, as it’s a bit off the beaten track for the cruise ships that plagues the Baltic. You have to sit in bus for a few hours to get there. Anyway I looked at the sky when I left the hotel and thought about a rain jacket, but no, the sky looked nice. Well 5 minutes later it laughed me in the face and let go of some rain, it did stop quite rapidly and the sun came back to stay, I just wandered around and enjoyed the splendour ... read more

Woke to a grey showery day & a 5.5 hr trip by private bus to the Swedish border & on to the village of Mora & a two night stay at the Hotell Fridhemsgatan. The outlook was mostly pine forest with a scattering of small communities. Just over the border is the village of Sälen, known for its huge ski fields & slopes. The Vasaloppsleden Trail runs from Sälen to Mora (approx 90 kms) & is the course for huge annual races for cyclists in summer & cross country skiing in winter. The course has an important place in Swedish history as 500 years ago Gustav Vasa escaped invading Danish forces but later successfully led an uprising against the occupying power and became King. The trail follows the escape route & the races take place to ... read more

Never been there , never done that and now it was time to see what it looks like. Finland, oh yes ,the land of a thousand lakes, most you don’t see because of all the trees. Fun fact here though, Sweden has about 40000 more lakes than Finland which goes to show who the braggarts are, yes yes they did make the Nokia 3210 Finland once a Swedish colony and a neighbouring country has yet to have had the pleasure of my presence. A hole in my working schedule got me two weeks off and off I took, to Stockholm and then the ferry to Turkku. The ferry is one of those big floating buses/bricks with too many staircases and corridors, a bit of a maze. I spent some time on the rear deck watching the ... read more