The supermarket was the first port of call as ever and if we thought Denmark was expensive, Sweden was even worse. After 45 minutes trying to come up with different dinner ideas then shunning them for their expense, we eventually plumped for beef burgers, pasta and a funny, round sweet bread thingy. The pouring rain kept us in for the rest of the evening.
We spent our first morning catching up on washing and writing up the Copenhagen blog. Eventually emerging into daylight around 1 o'clock. We headed to the tight and touristy streets of Gamla Stan, which is the old town of Stockholm and spent a good few hours in and out of souvenir shops to find a suitable pin badge to add to our ever growing collection. We lunched by the quayside on a ready made panini and a massive bag of crisps which definitely filled a hole. We trawled along the waters edge for a few miles looking for a place to grab a beer but everywhere seemed far too upmarket for us commoners. Fortunately we stumbled across a suitable watering hole, had unfortunately, a non-Swedish beer and speculated who the man on the big fat boat infront of us may be. We carried on along and took a huge diversion through affluent suburbs of Stockholm. By the time we got back to the hostel it had turned into a beautiful evening, we cooked up our pasta and baked beans and prepared our cheese sandwiches for the next 2 days under the watchful eyes of a horde of Germans playing cards. An evening stroll was on the cards for us, so we wandered down to the waterside and watched the sunset. During the day, our room had had 5 new arrivals, in the form of a group of Spaniards, who decided to get in at an ungodly hour and wake the room up.
After being surprised to see the Spaniards up so early, we crawled out of bed and out into the morning rain. Not letting this dampen our spirits we headed down to the harbour where we caught a ferry to the island of Vaxholm. With the ferry costing 75kr (£5) per person one way, we were happy to risk the trip even though we weren't sure what there was to do on the island. 70 minutes later and after a smooth ride, we arrived in Vaxholm. Still raining. We weren't sure where we were going, so as we do best, we just picked a road and headed down it. We picked a placed by the sea to eat our sandwiches and biscuits, which was nice in the sun, to see all the small boats coming and going from the tiny, floating station. We saw one young girl get off and meet up with a boy but not until her parents, who had dropped her off in the boat had moved well out sight. It was quite amusing later, on our walk around town to see the young girl being introduced to the parents. We moved on and followed the waterside looking for the tourist information but got distracted by a sign for mini golf but we were put off by the lack of adults playing when we arrived. Just past the mini golf was a park, which had a roundabout powered by pedals, this we couldn't resist despite the fact that this was obviously for kids and both jumped on to have a go. With the small town covered we headed back to the harbour to catch our ferry home, just hopping on the next ferry we thought would be the same as the one we arrived on. How wrong we were, for some unknown reason the fare had increased to 110 kr!! We decided to head back to the hostel for the early evening to try and beat the huge gang of Germans to the kitchen, however when we got back, the kitchen was empty but we stupidly didn't use this to our advantage. Instead, putting the photos up on our previous blog. We then battled through the waves to try and cook our beans and noodles, which we eventually did despite the mess the kitchen had been left in. Another broken sleep ensued, due to the Spaniards fancying another late night.
We headed out the next morning to Djurgarden which is a huge island, covered pretty much entirely by a park. We headed through the rather disappointing beginning which houses a large theme park and the ABBA museum and into the peace and tranquility of the countryside in the centre of the city. After eating the remainder of our cheese sandwiches sat on a log in the scorching sun, we circumnavigated the sea wall which took us a good few hours. After a long day in the heat, we picked up a couple of pizzas for dinner and went for our now regular evening walk to see the sunset again.
Our final day was a cold and wet one. We walked to the Viking Line ferry terminal to get our route for the following day and then headed back in a big circle over a rather large bridge, which wasn't Charlotte's favourite thing we've done so far! We had a cozy evening in reading our books while the rain lashed down outside
We had been hoping that the Spaniards would leave before us but they checked out the same morning, the only consolation we took, was that we would never have to see them again...
We were really excited to catch the ferry to our next stop, Helsinki.
James and Charlotte
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