Stockholm skärgården

Leaving Nora was incredibly difficult and it wasn't made any better when our first experience in Stockholm was with the crowds and bustle of Central station. We had checked into our hotel, StayAt Bromma and Col and I drove out to drop the car off at the airport. The plan was to meet Ruth and Rhett in town and do a bit of exploring in the afternoon. Having two Central station areas, one for trains(from the airport) one for the S-Bahn(from the hotel) didn't help, neither did the huge and pushy crowds. Why did we ever leave the peace and quiet (and sauna) of Nora?

Luckily Stockholm is an amazing city and soon redeemed itself when we wandered through Gamla Stan(the old town). Gamla Stan is an obvious tourist attraction and we heard a lot more English and other languages than we were used to, but it's such a beautiful city centre with cobble stone streets, tiny twisty alleys and amazing old buildings that you spend more time appreciating the town itself than being worried by overbearing American tourists.


Afternoon light on the shutters in Gamla Stan


One of the many beautiful buildings in Gamla Stan

The hotel was a really good fit for us. It was right on the S-bahn line that led straight into the city and with our Stockholm cards we had unlimited travel on all of the public transport for 72 hours. It had a small kitchenette in each room(we were staying in the business apartments) and wasn't just a room with a large bed in the middle of it. This made things heaps easier with cooking food for Josie and hanging out with Ruth and Rhett in the evenings. We even saved a bit of money by cooking a few meals for ourselves. Stockholm remains a very expensive city to hang out in. We got our first glimpse of the Olympics here in the breakfast room where they had a large flatscreen TV tuned in every morning to the events in Beijing.

The next morning we headed back in to Gamla Stan to see the changing of the guard at the Kungliga Slottet. It was 45 minutes of tourist theatre and nothing more, but it was fun to see the bright blue uniforms and all the crowds of people holding their digital cameras above their heads trying to get a decent photo. Photography sure has changed in the last couple of decades... Actually the highlight of the whole spectacle was one of the horses deciding that he really didn't want his rider any more and rearing up until he fell off. We never did find out what happened to that poor soldier.

Good formation of Swedish soldiers marching by

We walked across the bridge to Södermalm and found a few cool shops, one full of clothes for the girls, and one across the street full of high end audio equipment for the boys! We had some good coffee at the corner shop and then headed for the edge of the island where we had heard of a slow food restaurant that sounded pretty interesting. Unfortunately when we got there they had closed the kitchen for lunch so we headed up the road to another very very fun café that had chai tea and incredible food. It was like a Newtown café transplanted to the seaside in Stockholm and was just the perfect place for us to unwind and spend a few hours chilling out.

Some crackingly good looking folks along the water's edge


On a really high bridge looking back over Stockholm

Skansen is Stockholm's outdoor zoo and historical recreation space and is a great place to hang out for a day in the sunshine. We were getting slightly more sunshine in Stockholm than we'd received in Nora and hadn't had any rain at all, but it still would have been nice if it was actively warm. Skansen has a whole bunch of old craft houses where they still practice woodworking, glass blowing and pottery the way it was done back in the 1600s

Traditional wooden forms still used for blowing glass. Still doing the simplest thing that works.


A beautiful set of woodworking chisels


Some very cute and ferocious bears

Our last big adventure in Stockholm was a ferry ride out in to the skärgården (archipelago) to visit Grinda. We missed our boat to Svartö that morning and so decided on Grinda instead. It turned out to be a fortuitous timing problem as Grinda was just what we needed after a hectic few days in the city. The ferry ride out was on a very comfortable large ferry run by the Waxholms bolaget (company). They've been running ferry services out into the skärgården for the last 150 years and were bang on time at every stop on the way out. And there were a lot of stops, the ferry must have made about 15 before we landed on Grinda out near the edge of the middle part of the archipelago.

Sail regatta in the skärgården

Grinda was a nice size island that had trails over most of it and we managed to find the highest point of the island fairly early on. This gave us an incredible view out over the island and the archipelago and the sun was nice and warm on the rocks so we spent quite a while there just hanging out and soaking up the atmosphere.

Hanging on the highest point of Grinda

We went to the north end of the island after that and managed our first dip in the Baltic for this trip which was quite cold but very worth while. We even had a couple of ducks come up on shore near us to thank us for the showing. Invigorated by the cool clean waters we headed back to the harbour where we had some fairly uninspiring food accompanied by some very, very Euro DJ efforts that of course included ABBA and watched the sun set over the water.

Sparkling reflections as the sun starting sinking

We headed back to the ferry dock to catch our ferry home just as the sun started putting on a real show and thankfully we managed to snap a few photos of the sky going crazy with colour. It was a truly memorable and remarkable day and I think next time we go to Sweden we'll spend more time at Nora and plan to do some island hopping in the archipelago in Stockholm instead of staying on the mainland. There are all sorts of interesting islands with youth hostels, hotels, restaurants and communities to explore and you can get day passes for unlimited archipelago ferry travel which sounds like a great idea to me. Anyone interested in joining in must be into cycling, exploring, appreciating incredible beauty and posing for an endless series of photographs in one of the most amazing places on Earth. Just like the folks I went with this time around! So thanks to the amazing Ruth, Rhett, Josie team and of course my ever lovely wife Col for making the trip to Sweden and Stockholm such a great one. Tack ska ni ha!

Red hot island glowing in the setting sun

Swedish sauna and sommerstuga sojourn

After having talked their ears off over the years about Sweden and how great it is and how everything cool comes from Sweden (IKEA, the Swedish Chef, Volvo etc...) we finally managed to get all of us on a plane there. This was our only actual vacation that we were taking while we were in Germany, a whole week off and it was a little scary that all of a sudden we were going to be in Sweden and if it turned out to be horrible then it was pretty much all my fault, seeing as how I am the past-president of the Swedish fanclub and it was my idea to go and visit while we were here. It was so close after all, how could we not go?

We landed in Arlanda airport to find some pretty interesting poster work in the arrivals terminal.

Capital of not just Sweden, but Scandinavia too! I wonder if the Norwegians know about this?

We picked up our hire car at the airport. No not a Volvo. It was looking like it was going to be a Toyota at one stage which would have been an absolute tragedy on a fairly cosmic scale, driving a Japanese car while in Sweden, home to Volvo and Saab. Luckily however we got to cruise out of the carpark and onto the highway to Nora in a Skoda Octavia station wagon which was huge and comfortable and fit our needs just perfectly and also happens to come from the Czech Republic. How often are you going to find one of those puppies in Australia or Canada? Hah!

A few hours later and a little(quite a lot actually) shopping at the local Willys saw us arriving on the dock at Nora. Lars arrived soon thereafter in Buster (the scissors boat - it's made by Fiskars!) to greet us and take us across the lake to Alntorps Ö where we were to spend the next couple of days.


Lars, Ruth & Rhett Enjoying a boat ride in Buster


Malou having a great time!

Lars and Malou, our hosts for our sommerstuga adventure and my neighbours in Malmö when I lived there back in 1988/9, were as lovely as always and made everyone feel immediately at home. They have recently bought a new sommerstuga for themselves on the island (the white house sommerstuga is shared with Lars' brother's family) and so are still in the process of getting it set up the way they want. The first thing that they upgraded about the land was to install a brand new sauna which was to become our favourite feature of Nora that week! The new cottage also meant that it wasn't quite set up right for the 5 of us so we spent our nights sleeping at the yellow house next to the minigolf course. The yellow house has been various things over the years, a restaurant, café, hotel, shop and is being renovated to be used as a youth hostel at the moment. They're working from the outside in so it looks lovely from the exterior and still needs a bit of TLC on the inside. We had it all to ourselves though and so Ruth, Rhett and Josie got one room, we got another and we had plenty of room to spread our luggage and stuff around. It also had running hot water, showers and toilets so that was a bonus too!


The yellow house, a place to lay our heads

We spent most of the days with Lars and Malou, chatting, catching up, practising my direly out of date Swedish and visiting Nora across the lake. The evening were spent eating delicious food prepared in the tiny little kitchen(the next big renovation project) and then having a nice strong Danish beer in the sauna.

Contemplating the sauna

The sauna is built right next to the lake with a good wide deck in front of it which provides the luxury of being able to get nice and hot in the sauna, jump in the lake to cool down (rather rapidly as the lake was pretty cold!) and then reenter the sauna to warm up again and repeat the cycle. The addition of Danish Harboe beer didn't hurt the equation at all. For Ruth, Rhett and Col who had previously never liked saunas at all, the Nora method of sauna going was a revelation! There's something uniquely special about the process that leaves you incredibly relaxed and happy at the end with a pleasant buzz all over your skin. We've decided that the first thing we are going to do upon getting back to Canada is source a Swedish sauana and build it down near the dock. You had to walk in to the lake in Nora as it's not very deep but imagine how fun it will be if you can jump in!

We had a fair bit of rain and cool weather while we were in Nora but it didn't dampen our spirits at all and we had a fantastic time there. One particularly cool day we got a tour of the Nora Railways Museum from Lars' brother Hans who is the chairman of the board of the museum. He took us through all of the various buildings that are housing the steam trains and workshops for the museum and all of the trains are still in full working order which is quite amazing. If I'd had a tripod and another 5 days I could have spent my entire trip in that museum taking photos of all the amazing equipment and machinery. You'll just have to be satisfied with this photoset that I took while we were there.

Henry the green engine

Another great adventure was going picking mushrooms with Malou. It was a quiet day for everyone and so Col and I joined Malou in a trip to her favourite chantarelle picking spot to see if we could find anything for dinner. We wandered the forest for hours, finally able to tune our eyes in to the particular shade of yellow that the chantarelles had and figuring out good places that they might be growing. It's only when you spend a lot of time in a forest looking intensely at the ground that you realise just how many different kinds of things are growing there. It's so much more than just the trees. We ended up with a pretty good haul and Col and I are now dedicated "kantarelle plocker" junkies, that's another thing we're going to have to figure out when we get home, is whether chantarelles grow in the forests in B.C....

We had a wonderful time in Nora and couldn't quite figure out why we were leaving when we piled back into the Skoda and set off for Stockholm. But that's another tale which I'll leave for later...


Beautiful Nora

The full photo set from our time in Nora can be found by clicking the title of this post or clicking here.