Day 2 of cruise Stockholm - day 40

Lovely day of 23 degrees

We got up early ready to get off the boat as soon as we could. Well that wasn’t fun. Queued up with a lot of people in the stairwells waiting to burst out. Jody was quite excited as we were meeting up with Anton. Anton is the brother of Jody’s previous Swedish exchange student (Tova) who she has kept in touch with over the years and now has a 7 month old daughter Charlie – I have been hearing a LOT about Charlie on this trip, and am quite good at remembering her name now. Tova’s partner is Jeff who is Jody’s part-time house mate when he is in NZ. Jeff and Tova live 6 hours north of Stockholm, so that was a long way to bring a baby so having Anton as a tour guide was the next best thing. Jeff had messaged me this morning to see where we were at. I thought this was a bit odd as I thought Jody would have been keeping him up to date. In fact it was because he was worried that their big surprise was going to be ruined if Jody was going to try and head off to see them – yep, the 3 of them had made the big trip down, and the Anton story was just a ruse. It was a rather tearful meeting as Jody was very very happy and excited to see all of them. So after everyone calmed down, Tova used her app to find us a bus, and we went off to one of the islands. They all went to a café for a coffee and catchup while I went to the Vasa museum.

This is supposedly the largest maritime museum in the world. The Vasa ship is enormous and totally reconstructed within the museum. It was quite a sad story as the ship was built in the 1600s and had an original design. The King decided he wanted it to be more ornate, and the masts to be longer etc etc, and the hull wasn’t designed for that. So, 20 mins into its maiden voyage it sank. It was in a canal which was 30m deep, and the masts were 50m high, so they were still sticking out. It was recovered in the 1900s at some stage and reconstructed in this museum. There were lots of interesting facts in the museum with one section devoted to how the women lived at the time. Then I went back to the others, and we headed off on a walk around the island where we ended up at a place for lunch. This was like a garden place where you could buy plants but had been converted into an amazing restaurant as well with lots of outdoor seating. The bread and butter were free and that was nearly as good as the rest of the meal. Interestingly when we finished, we packed up our own plates etc, and emptied them and then stacked them neatly in the appropriate receptacle. Apparently, that is a common thing to do in Sweden. After a bit more of a walk on the island we ended up at the ABBA museum. Jody and I went in to see this, and it was pretty wonderful.

The first exhibit was devoted to the making of the mama mia movies with lots of different things like the cars, clothes, movies of the making of the movie etc. Then it went on to describe the early life of the 4 band members, how they met each other, their first hits etc etc. There were quite a few rooms of this with of course their music playing in lots of places. Then we also got to mix our own music, get a recording of us singing a song, and we also had a video made of the 2 of us singing with the band. Don’t worry, I don’t think any of those will be shared on fb when we return, but it was a lot of fun going with someone else who appreciated it.

Then it was time to have an icecream and say goodbye which was a bit sad, but we had all had a lovely day. Jody and I took a taxi back to the ship. We had a curfew of 4.30 and were a bit nervous about missing it. We were back around 4.15 so had plenty of time. Some other people were just after 4.30, and it was fun being on the balcony encouraging them to RUN, RUN. The buses that had been out on the excursions all seemed to come back late, even later than these people, so they were ok. So, we were supposed to leave at 5pm, but just after that in the distance we saw more people walking, then running. They were so very very lucky that the ship didn’t leave without them as they didn’t get there until about 5.10. It is possibly 1 to 1.5kms from where the taxis dropped them off to where they could get on the ship, and we could see that whole way. It was rather amusing, and we thought we would never be in that situation (turn to tomorrow’s post!).

So then it was time for dinner, then a show which was the standard Royal Carribean 4 singers and 8 dancers.Read more