Beautiful, peaceful, enchanting
Stockholm, Sweden today! Another country I could spend days exploring. We were able to get off the boat at 9am this morning. Once again
Disney had buses at the port to take us to the main part of the city.
Such a huge lifesaver not having to arrange for a cab or walk a long distance
to get to public transportation. Once in the city we quickly realized
that Justin's intended one-mile walk to the Vasa Museum was going to take us much
longer than expected, especially at the pace Drew was starting out at.
It's funny we've seen so many kids his age in strollers and it seems so odd
since we haven't seen a stroller in years, but I suppose it could be helpful at
times. Drew typically has no problem keeping pace with my fast pace
stroll, but he's two weeks into a very active vacation so we can't blame the
kid for slowing down a bit by this point. We're all actually pretty
tired. The walk along the water
was beautiful.
Anyhow, as we were passing by a
hop-on-hop-off tour stand they asked if we were interested and with a
little negotiation we secured ourselves some day passes and soon boarded a boat
that took us directly to the Vasa Museum. The Vasa Museum was a must see
on our Sweden point of interest list, but to be honest we really didn't know
much about it. When we walked into the museum with the Vasa ship situated
right in front of us it took all of us by surprise. It was striking. It’s so big it’s impossible to get a
picture of the whole thing so here’s a bit of video.
We explored the various levels
of the museum, each offered a different view of the restored vessel and
exhibiting artifacts from the ship. The movie was particularly
informative and interesting. The Vasa sunk on its maiden voyage back in
1628 and remained at the bottom of the Saltsjon for over 300 years, until 1961
when it was raised from it's grave and restored.
After the Vasa Museum we rode
the boat around the city.
We got off at Gamla Stan (Old
Town) and were near the palace and able to catch part of the changing of the guards;
however, there were so many people that we didn't stick around too long.
Justin attempted to give us a
walking tour of Old Town, but he quickly got turned around and we decided to
just walk around for a bit.
We stumbled upon the Martens Grand,
which is apparently the narrowest alley in all Gamla Stan and is covered with
graffiti - warrants a walk through, right?
It was starting to sprinkle a
bit so we decided we catch a hop-on-hop-off bus and ride around the city.
Problem was that due to a festival of sorts taking place the stops closest to
us were closed so we floundered around the city in search of a bus - these are
the moments most frustrating to me. Wandering around aimlessly when there's
so much else we should/could be doing. We finally got on a bus, but
traffic was terrible so it took us 30 minutes to circle around a block to get
going at all. That's two hop-on-hop-off cities tours gone bust - London
& Sweden. When the bus got to the pier we decided to call it a day
and head back to the ship to get food. There's so much food in these
places we visit, but I can't justify forking out big bucks when if we wait a
couple hours we can have all the food we can stomach without any additional cost.
That's tough for me because a large part of what I enjoy about traveling is
trying out new restaurants and yummy foods. Not really feasible with a
large family. Good thing there’s
all the ice-cream cones we could ever want onboard.
Katie and Drew ran off to the
Kids Club immediately after we got on board. Jason killed some time doing
who knows what until a movie started that he wanted to see and the girls, as
usual, we're off doing their own things. After grabbing something to eat,
Justin and I settled on deck to watch the ship leave port. Sweden is made
up of thousands of islands and our ship sailed right through them. It was
dreamy. One of the prettiest scenes from the entire trip and that's really
saying something. Pictures just don't do it justice.
We all (less Carly) watched an
early evening performance of Disney Dreams - another fun Disney production for
the whole family. We decided to skip our dinner reservation and instead
get Katie and Drew to bed and order some room service. Our sixth day at
sea and this was our first room service order - for shame! I made up for
it though and ordered a cheese platter, tomato soup, grilled cheese sandwich, a
margarita pizza, macaroni and cheese and a Mickey bar. Yum!
Tonight was the first night we
didn't set an alarm. An entire day of rest and relaxation at sea was much
needed.
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