We slept in a bit but got going around eight. We got coffee, tea, and a couple tasty raisin buns from the Dutch Cafe and decided we could just eat that, shower, and then get a couple more pastries to go since our plan was to walk into the city.
Julie had taken a wrong turn somewhere while walking back from the Vasa Museum yesterday, and had to find her way down from a hill above the cruise terminal, but she was certain there is a way to walk along the water after crossing the last bridge. So we decided to walk from the ship instead of taking the shuttle bus.
It was a sunny day but the wind was quite chilly. We passed a photography museum with some weird art outside.
We made our way along the water and found a bunch of construction near the base of the bridge. There was a path marked through it, but it was easy to understand how Julie missed the turn to go through the construction detour when walking back toward the ship. There was definitely a lot of construction happening around Stockholm.
We could see a small island connected to an even smaller one more or less in the middle of the bigger islands making up the central parts of the city so we decided to make our way there. We discovered that these islands, Skeppsholmen and Kastellholmen, had been used originally as royal amusement and relaxation centers, but in the 1640’s they became a naval base for Sweden’s growing fleet of warships. Over the centuries more naval infrastructure was built on them, but the recreation aspect always remained to some extent, including a cafe, bath house, and park. After almost three hundred years the military operations began phasing out and now most of the buildings have been converted into public attractions like museums, theaters, restaurants, and schools.
A big, old, three-masted ship that looked like it might be used for naval training was moored there, with a couple people working high in the rigging.
There was an old mareograph, an instrument to record sea level, from 1889. The information plaque claims that people in Stockholm have been measuring the water level longer than anywhere else in the world.
The smaller island, Kastellholmen, has a small castle. We sat here on the rocks in the sun for a while where it felt warm because it was sheltered from the wind.
Instead of warships, the larger island now has a number of old ships registered with Sweden’s Boating Association. It was surprising to see many ships that were built seventy or even a hundred and ten years ago still being maintained and used. Most of the ships had information plaques, and some of the better plaques showed old photos which revealed how dramatically a ship could change over the decades as the purposes it was being used for changed.
We walked back to the city center and found the shuttle bus to take us back to our ship, but it was stuck at a roadblock. The King of the Netherlands had decided to pay his friend the King of Sweden a visit, so we watched a procession of police vehicles, security vehicles, police horsemen, army horsemen, king’s guards on horseback, a couple of carriages (one with the King), then a few more horses and vehicles pass by. We went ahead and boarded the bus, but the road remained closed, so after about fifteen minutes we decided to just walk back. It turns out the road stayed closed because most of the horses came back from the palace followed by a bunch of guards marching. It took us forty minutes to walk to the ship from there, but I don’t think we ended up being more than a couple minutes later than the bus.
Back on the ship we got some rice patty burgers from the Dive In. The ship un-moored around 2:30 and we began cruising through the archipelago east of Stockholm. We sat on our deck watching islands go by, sometimes surprisingly close to the ship. However, the ship turned and the wind began blowing hard at us, so eventually we had to watch from inside the cabin.
One unusual island appeared to have a few tunnels bored into the side of a small cliff.
We relaxed for a little and then got together with Joann. We all took COVID tests again and all got negative results, so we decided it was safe to return to the main dining room for dinner.
After dinner we walked around the ship on deck three a few times, then picked up Joann to go to the main show: pianist and singer Lisa Harman this evening. She did different songs from her previous show and I really enjoyed a couple of them, but she had some strange adaptations of Billy Joel songs that I felt really did not work.