Sunday, July 5, 2015
Of course, we didn’t go to sleep last night until almost
midnight. It almost looked dusk-like outside. I guess that is the difference in
latitude! It may take us a while to get over yesterday and the literal 24-hour
day of daylight and travel and messed up sleep schedule. People up there will
tell you within minutes of meeting you if they’ve stayed through a “dark
season” or more than one. Hardly anyone will tell you they’ve stayed up there
through consecutive dark seasons or winters. To me, I would think the endless
sunshine would be as hard to take as the endless night. Evidently, the endless
night is a bigger than you’d expect tourism attraction. I guess I can see it.
There is dog-sledding and snow-mobiling and cross-country skiing and the aurora
borealis. If it was about a constant 10C in the height of summer, I can’t
imagine how constant cold it would be!
This morning we slept in. Breakfast was an hour later at
Freys Hotel because of it being Sunday, so we had nowhere to be early.
Breakfast was a lot busier than when we were here before. It was mostly
Jehovah’s Witnesses. They are everywhere in Stockholm. I don’t know where there
convention is actually being held but they are everywhere we’ve been in
Stockholm. So, we enjoyed a hearty crowded breakfast buffet.
We had plans to buy transit passes at the T station across
the street and go down to the harbor and take a HOHO boat tour. We planned to
get off at the ABBA Museum stop and go to Skansen, the Swedish outdoor museum.
We did that. It did not go as smoothly as planned, but we didn’t have any
deadlines so the excessive wandering we did was not a loss. We wound up with
tickets on the Grayline Green HOHO boat. You could also buy a combo bus/boat
ticket. But we just stayed with the boat. It was 175SEK per person. We went all
the way around once by changing boats at the beginning because we had lucked
onto the one boat in the fleet without guiding. We wanted the guiding to
refresh ourselves from our last orientation tour here. The second pass we got
off and went to Skansen. I am sure we only saw about half of this huge park. It
was amazing. It was the one place full of locals and not Jehovah’s Witnesses.
It is sunny and hot here now. Clay is happy but also unhappy because of the ice
problem and no A/C. Otherwise he prefers hot to cold. He was happy to get his
shorts back out of his big suitcase! And he can wear his sandals outside (they
were his indoor shoes up north!). After
Skansen, we went back to the dock to catch one of the last boats back to Gamla
Stan. The HOHO boats stop running with a last boat at 4pm. If we weren’t on the
last, it was only 15 minutes behind us. We got off at the first Gamla Stan stop
mostly because it was rough in the harbor this afternoon and also because Clay
booked us on Segway Tours at 1pm tomorrow in Gamla Stan and we wanted to be
sure we knew where to find it. The sign said he booked us on the Sodermalm
tour. Looking at his confirmation email, it says Stockholm Heights and Shores
so that is probably right. He thought he was booking a tour of Gamla Stan. Oh
well, we had a guided walking tour there the first day we were in Stockholm and
now we have wandered it some more ourselves and we can do some more tomorrow
before and after the Segway tour. We had dinner tonight sitting outside on the
curb at Movitz, a bar/restaurant in Gamla Stan. We both had beef. Clay’s came
with mashed potatoes and a strong beer. Mine came with fries and bernaise. I
had a big glass of water with ice cubes! Clay had to have some. We had eaten
snacks in Skansen. They were baking in wood burning ovens and stuff and that was
what we had except for a Coke and a pear juice. We were thrilled when we found
a water fountain and got drinks and refilled my water bottle. A guide leading a
group of Indians, saw them staring at us (in thirst!) and pointed out that it
was perfectly safe to drink the water here. About 18 of them lined up! So
dinner was good and there was a cool breeze off the water since it was less than
a block away. It was a nice atmospheric meal. We walked on down to the
waterfront street and found the T stop and the Segway place a block from it. We
took the T one stop back to the Central Station and then struggled to find our
way back to the hotel since we took different train lines out and back. Those
stations go for blocks underground and it seems like you never come up where
you expected to. It was a good day.
