Vasa museum
It was our final morning on the cruise ship. We’d booked a tranfer/tour to the central train station in the morning, and we had a nice tour around the city. We first stopped at the Vasa museum and since it was early Sunday morning and we were the first ones into the museum, we had a really good and uninterrupted tour. After this stop we drove to a few other spots in the city. Our tour covered some of the same areas we’d been on with the Hop-on Hop-off bus, but the commentary wsa much better, and so we learned a lot more.
Scansen guides weaving birch bark shoes
JIt looked like it was going to rain for much of the morning, but by noon it had cleared up. We walked to Djurgarden Island from the central train station and to the Scansen open air museum. This was a very interesting place to go, as it has many old buildings from the early 1800’s to the mid 1930’s. Many of the buildings were occupied by interpretive guides, in period costume, who described what was happening in Sweden at that time in history.
The park also includes a small zoo, with northern animals, and a children’s petting zoo. In part of the park there is an open air restaurant. We saw a man with a couple of children in a stroller. He left his food on the table, and went to get something else. The gulls swooped down and stole his food — he was not happy!
We stayed in Scansen until after 5 pm, then walked back There is a pedestrian mall not far from the station, and we thought we would eat there, but couldn’t find much that interested us. Finally we found a coffee shop that sold lasagna.
The high speed train travels the approximately 45 km to the airport in about 20 minutes. They display the speed in the train, and it was over 200 km/hr.
As we were waiting to check in our luggage at the airport, there was a family in front of us. The father and mother were figuring out what to do with their luggage — they had quite a lot — when suddenly the father looked around and went running off in the airport calling his child’s name. His small daughter, about two or three, had disappeared. It was a sickening feeling to watch the parent’s panic, but fortunately he found her in about a minute, as she had gone into a candy shop. The parents were talking to the clerk with their backs to the childen while they dealt with the clerk; however Enid and I were facing forward, and never noticed the little girl disappear at all. It shows how quickly and easily a tragedy with a missing child can occur.
We were about half an hour late leaving Stockholm. I didn’t sleep at all on the plane, but Enid did. With a two hour time change we got into Keflavik close to 1 am (but that seemed like 3 am to us). The airport terminal was very crowded, and we disembarked the plane by a bus. As there were no signs to indicate the baggage claim where we got off, we had a hard time locating our luggage belt in the crowds of people.
There was no Thrifty car rental desk in the terminal, but a man waiting in line for one of the other rental companies told us that we could take the shuttle, or just walk as it wasn’t far. We couldn’t find a shuttle bus, so did walk, and it was about 4 or 500 metres away. We were done with our rental agreement and driving off as the shuttle van arrived.
It was a very good thing that I had written down the directions to our B & B from Google maps in Stockholm. The sun was either setting or rising — not quite sure which — as we drove into the yard. It’s not well marked, and at first we weren’t sure where it was. Finally we decided it had to be the last house on the road, so drove into the driveway, and the manageress came out and said “David?” so we knew we were at the right place. It was a very long day, with about 12 km of walking in Stockholm, and then a long plane ride.