Our second day at sea the ship seemed fuller than usual, which makes sense because no-one is on shore and everyone wants to get out and move around. We got up around eight and went and worked out after breakfast. There were many more people in the fitness center than the last time we were there.
We cut our workout a bit short in order to go see a presentation about Nordic explorers. It featured Liv Arnesen, the first woman to reach the South Pole un-supported via skis; Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose bequest created and funded the Nobel Prize Committee; and Ole Kirk Christiansen, the Danish inventor of LEGO.
After lunch we went to the Holland America Future Cruise presentation, which was less sales-y and more informative than I expected. There are some interesting cruises around South America that also go toward Antarctica.
We saw a fair amount of ship traffic.
We invited Oscar and Joann to join us in our room for cocktails before dinner. Oscar was coughing a bit and mentioned he’d had difficulty sleeping due to a cough so we convinced him to take a COVID test despite his certainty that it was related to some food he’d had trouble swallowing the day before, and it showed positive immediately.
He was sent to a different room in an isolation section of the ship and we were given tests of our own, but the rest of us all showed negative. We ordered room service with Joann for dinner and tried to comprehend the consequences of this change in our vacation (while also isolating ourselves). Despite the ship having felt so full we realized a fair fraction of rooms must have been reserved for isolation.
Oscar was the only member of our party who ended up with COVID and we never could figure out what he had done differently from the rest of us because we were together much of the time.
The ship’s staff had been consistently reminding people to wash their hands frequently, and recommended the use of masks, but we were in the minority of people who actually wore them in the halls and in the theater.
We ordered room service for breakfast and ate while watching Swedish islands filled with autumn-leaved trees glide past outside.
We walked around the outside of the ship while the workers got it moored around ten and discovered we can talk to Oscar while he is on the balcony of his isolation room one floor above.
We had booked an excursion to the Vasa Museum, Sigtuna, and old town Stockholm. Julie decided to only do the Vasa Museum part and then walk back to the ship to make sure Joann was doing OK and still healthy.
The Vasa Museum was really interesting. The ship is incredibly well preserved and our guide provided a lot of helpful information. While the wood remained largely intact after being buried in the frigid mud of the Baltic Sea, researchers discovered that much of the ship’s trim and many other parts were painted in a wide variety of colors, so that it probably appeared somewhat gaudy when it set sail, although I’m sure the intention was “opulent”.
After the museum tour ended Julie set off to walk back to the ship while the rest of the tour group and I got on the bus. We left the city center via a long tunnel, and then got on the E-4, Sweden’s main highway, where we found quite a bit of traffic. A bit under an hour on the bus brought us to Sigtuna, a small town that was the former capital of Sweden.
We stopped in an old church that was originally Dominican, but now Lutheran.
Nearby are the ruins of an even older church, St. Olof’s Church.
This area of Sweden holds a lot of runestones from before the tenth century.
Then we saw the town hall which was built in 1744.
We had a lunch of meatballs and potatoes with cranberries and pickled cucumber slices at a small restaurant, and our large group seemed to surprise a few of the locals, then we had some free time to wander some of the oldest streets in Sweden.
I found a nice park with an interesting style of telephone booth (no longer operational).
We boarded the bus to return back down the E-4, through the traffic, and into the center of Stockholm. The bus parked right in front of the King’s palace, so we learned a bit about the Swedish royal family. Then we walked through some of the oldest parts of Stockholm.
Many of the buildings on these narrow streets date back to the late 1600’s. The ground here has had some subsidence, so the old buildings have had to be internally reinforced in order to remain standing for so long. Part of the issue is that the ground in Sweden is still slowly “rebounding” from the weight of the glaciers that covered it in the ice age.
We also walked up the city’s narrowest street.
The tour finally returned us to the ship around seven. We ordered room service for dinner with Joann.